
Book Tfr/y 

By bequest of/ 

William Lukens Shoema 




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NOTES FROM LIFE. 



WORKS IN VERSE AND PROSE. 

BY HENRY TAYLOR, ESQ. 



PHILIP VAN ARTEVELDE. 

Fourth Edition. 24mo, 2s. 6d. 



EDWIN THE FAIR, and ISAAC COMNENUS. 

Second Edition. 24mo, 2s. 6d. 



THE STATESMAN. 

Fcap. 8vo, 6s. 6d. 



THE EVE OF THE CONQUEST; 

AND OTHER POEMS. Fcap. 8vo, 3s. 6d. 



NOTES FROM LIFE, 

Third Edition. Post 8vo, 6s. 



NOTES FROM BOOKS. 

Post 8vo. 9s. 



NOTES FROM LIFE 



IN 



SIX ESSAYS. 



MONEY. 

HUMILITY & INDEPENDENCE. 

WISDOM, 



CHOICE IN MARRIAGE. 

CHILDREN. 

THE LIFE POETIC. 



HENRY TAYLOR, 
it 

AUTHOR OF "PHILIP VAN ARTEVELDE," "NOTES FROM BOOKS," ETC. 



THIRD EDITION. 



LONDON : 
JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET. 

1849. 






LOHDOS : 
LDBURY 4SD EVAN'S, PRINTERS, WHITE* RIA RS. 



Gift 

W. L. Shoemaker 



? S '06 






THE EARL OF ABERDEEN, K.T., 



ETC. ETC. ETC. 



THIS BOOK IS INSCRIBED, 



GREAT RESPECT AND REGARD, 



THE AUTHOR. 



PREFACE. 

In the year 1836 I published a book called 
the " Statesman," a title much found fault 
with at the time, and in truth not very 
judiciously chosen. It contained the views 
and maxims respecting the transaction of 
public business, which twelve years of expe- 
rience had suggested to me. But my expe- 
rience had been confined within the doors of 
an office, and the book was wanting in that 
general interest which might possibly have 
been felt in the results of a more extensive 
and varied conversancy with public life. 



viii PREFACE. 

Moreover, the sub-sarcastic vein in which 
certain parts of it were written was not 
very well understood, and what was meant 
for an exposure of some of the world's ways 
was, I believe, very generally mistaken for 
a recommendation of them. I advert, now, 
to this book and its indifferent fortunes, be- 
cause whatever may have been its demerits, 
my present work must be regarded as to 
some extent comprehended in the same de- 
sign, — that, namely, of embodying in the form 
of maxims and reflections the immediate 
results of an attentive observation of life, — 
of official life in the former volume, — of life 
at large in this. For more than twenty years 
I have been in the habit of noting these 
results as they were thrown up, when the 
facts and occurrences that gave rise to them 



PREFACE. ix 

were fresh in my mind/- A large portion of 
them I would more willingly have transfused 
into dramatic compositions. Year after year 
I have indulged the belief that I might find 
health, leisure, and opportunity for doing so, 
nor do I yet relinquish the hope that I may 
gain the time for some further efforts of 
that nature before I lose the faculty. But 
the years wear away, and though I do not 
hold that youth is the poet's prime, yet I feel 
that after youth the imagination cannot be 
put on and taken off with the same easy 
versatility, — that a continuous absorption in 



* Some of the notes were originally made in verse ; others 
were, from time to time, converted into verse, to serve the 
purposes of dramatic or poetic works in progress or in con- 
templation; and I have not hesitated to quote the verses in 
illustration of the prose, as often as the versified form seemed 
to give a reflection or an aphorism a better chance of finding 
a resting-place in the memory of the reader. 



x PREFACE. 

the dramatic theme is more indispensable to 
its treatment, and that, consequently, such 
pursuits come to be less readily combined 
with other avocations. Other avocations I 
am unable to discard, and lest, therefore, I 
should never be in a condition to realise a 
better hope, I have put into this prosaic form 
such of my reflections on life as I have 
thought worthy in one way or another to 
be preserved. 

MORTLAKE, 

November, 1847. 



CONTENTS. 



PAGE 

MONEY . 1 

HUMILITY AND INDEPENDENCE 38 

CHOICE IN MARRIAGE 56 

WISDOM 97 

CHILDREN 118 

THE LIFE POETIC 143 



ESSAYS 



OF MONEY. 



The philosophy which affects to teach us 
a contempt of money does not run very deep ; 
for, indeed, it ought to be still more clear to 
the philosopher than it is to ordinary men, 
that there are few things in the world of 
greater importance. And so manifold are 
the bearings of money upon the lives and 
characters of mankind, that an insight which 
should search out the life of a man in his 
pecuniary relations would penetrate into 
almost every cranny of his nature. He who 
knows, like St. Paul, both how to spare and 
how to abound, has a great knowledge : for 
if we take account of all the virtues with 
which money is mixed up, — honesty, justice, 



Z OF MONEY. 

generosity, charity, frugality, forethought, 
self-sacrifice, — and of their correlative vices, — 
it is a knowledge which goes near to cover 
the length and breadth of humanity : and a 
right measure and manner in getting, saving, 
spending, giving, taking, lending, borrowing, 
and bequeathing, would almost argue a 
perfect man. 

First : — As to the getting of money. This 
involves dangers which do not belong to the 
mere possession of it. " Blessed is the rich 
that is found without blemish, and hath not 
gone after gold/' says the Son of Sirach ; and 
again, — " He that loveth gold shall not be jus- 
tified, and he that followeth corruption shall 
have enough thereof."* Yet industry must 
take an interest in its own fruits ; and God 
has appointed that the mass of mankind 
shall be moved by this interest, and have 
their daily labour sweetened by it; and 
there may be a blessing even upon the going 
after gold, if it be not with an inordinate 

* Ecclesiasticus, xxxi. 8. 



OF MONEY. 3 

appetite — if the gold be not loved for its own 
sake, and if the manner of it be without 
blemish. But the danger arises out of the 
tendency of the human mind to forget the 
end in the means, and the difficulty of 
going after gold for the love of the benefits 
which it may confer, without going after it 
also for the mere love of getting it and keep- 
ing it, which is "following corruption." It 
behoves him who is getting money, therefore, 
even more than him who has it by inherit- 
ance, to bear in mind what are the uses of 
money, and what are the proportions and 
proprieties to be observed in saving, giving, 
and spending: for rectitude in the manage- 
ment of money consists in the symmetry of 
these three. 

Sudden and enormous gains almost always 
disturb the balance : for a man can scarcely 
change his scale suddenly, and yet hold his 
proportions : and hence proceeds one of the 
many evils of highly-speculative commerce, 
with its abrupt vicissitudes of fortune. The 
man who engages in it can scarcely have 

B 2 



4 OF MONEY. 

any fixed and regulated manner of dealing 
with his net income ; he knows not how 
much he ought to save, how much he may 
permit himself to spend, how much he can 
afford to give: whilst, even if he could 
know, the extreme excitements of fear and 
hope to which he lies open, occupy his mind 
too much for him to give many thoughts to 
such matters. And if what is called bold 
commercial enterprise be a thing to be 
rejoiced in as promoting the physical well- 
being of mankind, and thereby, perhaps, in 
the train of consequences, their moral inte- 
rests, it is only through that Providence by 
which good is brought out of evil. And the 
actors in such enterprises, when, as is mostly 
the case, they are merely " going after gold," 
and not considering either the physical or 
moral results, are, in their own minds and 
hearts, " following corruption," and are likely 
to " have enough thereof." 

A moderated and governed course in the 
getting of money is the more difficult, because 
this is, of all pursuits, that in which a man 



OF MONEY. O 

meets with the greatest pressure of competi- 
tion. So many are putting their hearts into 
this work, that he who keeps his out of it, is 
not unlikely to fare ill in the strife. And for 
this reason it were well for a man, not perhaps 
altogether to abate his desire of gain, (though 
this should be done if it be excessive), but 
more assiduously still to direct his desires 
beyond, and purify the desire of gain by 
associating with it the desire to accomplish 
some scheme of beneficent expenditure. And 
let no man imagine that the mere investment 
for reproduction, though economists may 
justly regard it as beneficial to mankind, will 
re-act upon his own heart for good. 

George Herbert is a good counsellor on 
this head of money-getting : — 

" Yet in thy thriving still misdoubt some evil ; 
Lest gaining gain on thee, and make thee dim 
To all things else. Wealth is the Conjuror's Devil, 

Whom, when he thinks he hath, the Devil hath him. 
Gold thou may'st safely touch ; hut if it stick 
Unto thy hands, it woundeth to the quick." * 

* The Church Porch. 



6 OF MONEY. 

Secondly: — As to the saving of money. 
The saving, like the getting, should be intel- 
ligent of a purpose beyond : it should not be 
saving for saving's sake, but for the sake of 
some worthy object to be accomplished by 
the money saved. And especially we are to 
guard against that accumulative instinct or 
passion which is ready to take possession of 
all collectors. 

Some very small portion of a man's income 
may perhaps be justifiably saved to make 
provision against undefined and unforeseen 
contingencies, and also to assure himself that 
he can save. But in the case of most men 
there will be a sufficiency of distinct and 
definable ends, whether certain or contingent, 
which will not only justify, but enjoin, the 
laying by of a proportion of their income. A 
young man may very well lay by money to 
enable him to be more free in the choice of a 
wife. A middle-aged man may lay it by in 
order that his old age may have fewer labours 
and cares or more comforts. A father may 
lay it by for his children. But in all these 



OF MONEY. 7 

cases, if the end be not kept steadily in view 
from first to last, and the means kept no 
more than proportionate and subordinate, 
there is the risk that the saver may become 
a miser. The young man may grow old with- 
out taking a wife, and save still when he no 
longer thinks of marrying ; or he may think 
that what he has saved may entitle him to a 
rich wife, rather than enable him to choose. 
The middle-aged man may reach old age 
with no disposition to increase his comforts 
and every disposition to increase his hoard. 
And finally, the father, though his motive for 
saving is the most natural and universal, and 
in general the most warrantable of all, may 
yet be betrayed by the very largeness of the 
allowance which the world makes in such 
cases, into avaricious errors. His case, as 
being the most common and that in which 
men are least on their guard, deserves to be 
the more closely considered. 

The prudent parent is less likely to be cor- 
rupted into a covetous parent, if he be saving 
for several children, than if it be for one 



8 OF MONEY. 

only child, or for an eldest son : for avarice 
projects itself more readily in the singular 
number than in the plural ; and saving for a 
provision is always to be distinguished from 
saving for aggrandisement, which is no other 
than a form of avarice. Saving for an only 
child or eldest son may be. defended when the 
father has means beyond the devisable patri- 
mony, and when that devisable patrimony is 
insufficient for the station to be inherited along 
with it. But if the patrimony be insufficient, 
and the father have no extrinsic means, he 
must not make it more insufficient in Ms 
lifetime, in order that it may be less insuffi- 
cient in his son's : he is not to be niggardly 
in order that his son may be liberal. He may 
indeed retrench in matters connected with 
the keeping up of appearances — that is, he 
may ostensibly retire from his station for a 
time, or for life ; but he must not, whilst 
keeping up the appearances of his station, 
fall short in matters of bounty and liberality. 
In saving for younger children, the parent 
has to consider what is a competency ; and if 



OF MONEY. 9 

he be wise, and can count upon an average 
share of health and abilities in his younger 
sons, he will not relieve them from the neces- 
sity of earning the main part of their liveli- 
hood ; for unless a man's property be large 
enough to find him an occupation in the 
management of it and in the discharge of the 
duties incident to it, (which generally speak- 
ing can only be the case of the eldest son,) it 
will be essential to his happiness that he 
should have to w r ork for his bread. And it 
is on this fact that the custom of succession 
according to primogeniture is to be defended ; 
for if any one is sacrificed by this custom, it 
is rather the eldest than the younger sons ; 
the eldest being too often pampered into self- 
love, — the most wretched inheritance of all, 
— the younger being trained in self-sacrifice, 
fortified in self-reliance, and through industry 
and progress leading a wiser, a better, a more 
generous, and a happier life. 

How much to save for a daughter is another 
question ; and since a woman's life for the 
most part turns upon her marriage, it is her 

B 3 



10 OF MONEY. 

matrimonial prospects which are principally to 
be regarded. Let not her wealth be too tempt- 
ing : an heiress has a large assortment of suit- 
ors, and yet an ill choice : and do not, if you 
can help it, let her poverty be an obstruction ; 
for prudent men make good husbands, and in 
many cases a man cannot marry with pru- 
dence where there is not the fair facility of a 
moderate fortune. I have heard, indeed, of 
a father who stinted his daughters' dowries 
on purpose that poor men might not be able 
to marry them ; whence he inferred that rich 
men would. He might be mistaken in his 
inference ; for though rich men can afford to 
marry poor maids, yet men are not found to 
wish less for money because they want it less, 
and in the making of marriages it is gene- 
rally seen that "wealth will after kind." 
Even if he were not mistaken, however, the 
calculation was but a sordid one at the best ; 
and considering how many requisites must be 
combined to make a good husband and a 
happy marriage, the father is likely to impose 
a cruel limitation of choice who needlessly 



OF MONEY. 11 

adds wealth to the number of essentials. 
Even the marriage which is poor through an 
improvident choice, is less likely to end ill 
than that which is rich through a constrained 
choice. 

There is yet another domestic object which 
may be a fair ground for saving out of a 
patrimony. One of the incidents of the law 
and custom of primogeniture to which our 
natural feelings are the least easily recon- 
ciled, is the effect of it upon the wife and 
mother when she passes into widowhood. 
She is deposed from her station and deprived 
of her affluence at the moment of her greatest 
domestic calamity, and her own child is the 
person to whom they are transferred. It 
may be that the cares, duties and responsi- 
bilities of a large property and a high pro- 
prietary station, are not suitable to a widow 
in the decline of life : but this is not left for 
her to determine, and very frequently the still 
less acceptable cares of a straitened income 
and a total change in her mode of life are 
fixed upon her. The force of custom has 



12 OF MONEY. 

brought the feelings of mankind into more 
accordance than one would have thought 
possible with so unnatural an arrangement ; 
but the husband needs not to be charged with 
parsimony who should save money with a 
view to mitigate the future contrast between 
his wife's position and his widow's. 

Of all undue savings, those of churchmen 
should be regarded with the least toleration. 
For though all wealth is, morally speaking, 
held in trust, the trust is of a more sacred 
nature in the case of wealth derived from the 
revenues of the Church. Out of that hire of 
which the labourer is worthy, he may leave 
to his family a competent provision ; but he 
does not leave to them a good name, if he 
leaves to them wealth which he did not in- 
herit. On this point the Church at large has 
latterly perhaps stood clear. It were to be 
wished that for the future it should see the 
best example set by the highest of its digni- 
taries. 

Thirdly : — As to the spending of money. 

The art of living easily as to money, is to 



OF MONEY. 13 

pitch your scale of living one degree below 
your means. Comfort and enjoyment are 
more dependent upon easiness in the detail of 
expenditure, than upon one degree's difference 
in the scale. 

Guard against false associations of pleasure 
with expenditure, — the notion that because 
pleasure can be purchased with money, there- 
fore money cannot be spent without enjoy- 
ment. What a thing costs a man is no true 
measure of what it is worth to him ; and yet 
how often is his appreciation governed by no 
other standard, as if there were a pleasure in 
expenditure per se. 

Let yourself feel a want before you provide 
against it. You are more assured that it is 
a real want ; and it is worth while to feel it 
a little, in order to feel the relief from it. 

When you are undecided as to which of 
two courses you would like best, choose the 
cheapest. This rule will not only save 
money, but save also a good deal of trifling- 
indecision. 

Too much leisure leads to expense ; because 



14 OF MONEY. 

when a man is in want of objects, it occurs 
to him that they are to be had for money ; 
and he invents expenditures in order to pass 
the time. 

A thoroughly conscientious mode of regu- 
lating expenditure implies much care and 
trouble in resisting imposition, detecting 
fraud, preventing waste, and doing what in 
you lies to guard the honesty of your stewards, 
servants, and tradesmen, by not leading them 
into temptation but delivering them from 
evil. A man who should be justly sensible 
of the duties involved in expenditure and 
determined to discharge them, would find the 
burthen of them heavy; and instead of having 
a pleasure in expense, he would probably 
desire as much as might be to avoid the 
trouble of it. We sometimes hear rich men 
charged with parsimony because they look 
minutely to differences of cost ; but if they 
are spending their money in a right spirit, 
the question they have to consider is, not 
whether the sum is of importance to them- 
selves, but whether it is right or wrong that 



OF MONEY. 15 

it should be given and taken. If then the 
acquisition of great wealth involve many 
cares and troubles, not few are those which 
should attend the due dispensing and 
managing thereof, as well as the execution 
of the various trusts belonging to the station 
into which great wealth will lift a man : — 

" For now know I in veray sothfastnesse 
That in gret lordship, if I me wel avise, 
Ther is gret servitude in sondry wise." * 

Young men, instead of undertaking the 
disagreeable office of checking accounts, are 
often inclined to lay out a good deal of 
money in the purchase of bows and smiles, 
which they mistake for respect. It is only 
the right and just payment that commands 
real respect : and the obsequious extortioner 
well understanding the weakness on which he 
practises, will often repay himself for his own 
servility, not only in money, but in secret 
contempt for his dupe. 

Prodigality is indeed the vice of a weak 

* Chaucer. Clerke's Tale, Pars 5 a . 



16 OF MONEY. 

nature, as avarice is of a strong one; it 
comes of a weak craving for those blandish- 
ments of the world which are easily to be had 
for money, and which, when obtained, are 
as much worse than worthless as a harlot's 
love is worse than none. 

" Thrice happy he whose nobler thoughts despise 
To make an object of so easy gains ; 
Thrice happy he who scorns so poor a prize 
Should be the crown of his heroic pains : 
Thrice happy he who ne'er was born to try 
Her frowns or smiles ; or being born, did lie 
In his sad nurse's arms an hour or two, and die."* 

Fourthly: — As to giving and taking. All 
giving is not generous; and the gift of a spend- 
thrift is seldom given in generosity; for prodi- 
gality is, equally with avarice, a selfish vice : 
nor can there be a more spurious view of 
generosity than that which has been often 
taken by sentimental comedians and novelists, 
when they have represented it in combination 
with recklessness and waste. He who gives 
only what he would as readily throw away, 

* Quarles. 



OF MONEY. 17 

gives without generosity ; for the essence of 
generosity is in self-sacrifice. Waste, on the 
contrary, comes always by self-indulgence ; 
and the weakness and softness in which it 
begins will not prevent the hard-heartedness 
to which all selfishness tends at last. The 
mother of Gertruda 

" In many a vigil of her last sick bed, 
Bid her beware of spendthrifts as of men 
That seeming in their youth not worse than light, 
Would end not so, but with the season change ; 
For Time, she said, which makes the serious soft, 
Turns lightness into hardness." 

When you give, therefore, take to yourself 
no credit for generosity, unless you deny 
yourself something in order that you may 
give. 

I have known a man who was never rich, 
and was indeed in a fair way to be ruined, 
make a present of several hundred pounds, 
under what he probably conceived to be an 
impulse of generous friendship : but if that 
man had been called upon to get up an hour 
earlier in the morning to serve his friend, I 



18 OF MONEY. 

do not believe that he would have done it. 
The fact was that he had no real value for 
money, no real care for consequences which 
were not to be immediate: in parting with 
some hundreds of pounds he flattered his self- 
love with a show of self-sacrifice ; in parting 
with an hour's folding of the hands to sleep, 
the self-sacrifice would have been real, and 
the show of it not very magnificent. 

Again, do not take too much credit even 
for your self-denial, unless it be cheerfully 
and genially undergone. Do not dispense 
your bounties only because you know it 
to be your duty, and are afraid to leave it 
undone : for this is one of those duties 
which should be done more in the spirit of 
love than in that of fear. I have known 
persons who have lived frugally, and spent 
a large income almost entirely in acts of 
charity and bounty, and yet with all this 
they had not the open hand. When the 
act did not define itself as a charitable duty, 
the spirit of the God-beloved giver was 
wanting, and they failed in all those little 



OF MONEY. 19 

genial liberalities towards friends, relatives 
and dependents, which tend to cultivate the 
sympathies and kindnesses of our nature 
quite as much as charity to the poor or 
munificence in the contribution to public 
objects. 

The kindness from which a gift proceeds 
will appear in the choice as well as in the 
cost of it. I have known a couple who 
married on 400Z. a year, receive three car- 
riages as -wedding gifts, they being unable 
of course to keep one. The donors had been 
thinking rather of what would do credit 
to themselves, than of what would be 
serviceable and acceptable : or they had not 
been thinking at all ; and if so they had not 
been really kind ; for real kindness is 
thoughtful. 

When gifts proceed from public bodies, 
communities, or high functionaries, in the 
way of testimonials, and are to do honour 
to the party receiving them, they should if 
possible assume a shape in which they will 
be seen without being shown. 



20 OF MONEY. 

There is often as much generosity in 
accepting gifts as there can be in bestowing 
them, — the generosity of a nature which 
stands too strong in its humility to fear 
humiliation, which knows its own indepen- 
dence, and is glad to be grateful. 

Upon a very different sense of generosity 
are some of the practices of the present 
time founded. It is not an uncommon thing 
amongst some persons, with peculiar notions 
of doing things delicately, for contributions 
to be conveyed to some decayed gentle- 
woman under various pretences which are 
meant to disguise, more or less transparently, 
the fact that she receives money in charity. 
Some wretched products of her pencil, which 
would not command one penny in the market, 
are privately sold for five shillings a piece, 
and the proceeds are paid to her as if she 
had earned them ; or a few deplorable 
verses are stitched together and disposed 
of in the same manner. It is surely impos- 
sible to take a more unworthy view of 
what should be the character and spirit 



OF MONEY. 21 

of a gentlewoman, than that which this 
sort of proceeding implies. If a gentle- 
woman be in want, she should say so with 
openness, dignity, and truth, and accept in 
the manner that becomes a gentlewoman, 
in all lowliness but without the slightest 
humiliation or shame, whatever money she 
has occasion for and others are walling to 
bestow. The relations between her and 
them will in that case admit of respect 
on the one side and gratitude on the 
other. But where false and juggling pre- 
tences are resorted to, no worthy or honest 
feeling can have place. Delicacy is a strong 
thing; and whether in giving or taking, 
let us always maintain the maxim, that 
what is most sound and true is most 
delicate. 

There are some other w r ays of the world 
in this matter of charity, which proceed, I 
think, upon false principles and feelings, 
— charity dinners, charity balls, charity 
bazaars, and so forth ; devices (not even once 
blessed) for getting rid of distress without 



22 OF MONEY. 

calling out any compassionate feeling in 
those who give or any grateful feeling in 
those who receive. God sends misery and 
misfortune into the world for a purpose ; 
they are to be a discipline for His creatures 
who endure, and also for His creatures who 
behold them. In those they are to give occa- 
sion for patience, resignation, the spiritual 
hopes and aspirations which spring from pain 
when there comes no earthly relief, or the 
love and gratitude which earthly ministra- 
tions of relief are powerful to promote. In 
these they are to give occasion for pity, self- 
sacrifice, and devout and dutiful thought, 
subduing — for the moment at least — the 
light, vain, and pleasure-loving motions of 
our nature. If distress be sent into the 
world for these ends, it is not well that it 
should be shuffled out of the world without 
any of these ends being accomplished ; and 
still less that it should be made the occasion 
of furthering ends in some measure opposite 
to these ; that it should be danced away at 
a ball, or feasted away at a dinner, or 



OF MONEY. 23 

dissipated at a bazaar. Better were it in 
my mind, that misery should run its course 
with nothing but the mercy of God to stay 
it, than that we should thus corrupt our 
charities. 

Let me not be misunderstood. Feasting 
and dancing, in themselves and by them- 
selves, I by no means disparage : there is a 
time and a place for them; but things 
which are excellent at one time and occa- 
sion, are a mere desecration at another. It 
is much more easy to desecrate our duties 
than to consecrate our amusements; and 
better therefore not to mix them up with 
each other. 

Another modern mode is to raise a sub- 
scription by shillings or pennies, — fixing the 
contribution at so low a sum that nobody 
can care whether they give it or not, and 
collecting it in the casual intercourse of 
society. This is a less vitiated mode than the 
others, being of a more negative character : 
but if the others are corrupted charity, this 
is no better than careless charity. 



24 OF MONEY. 

Lastly, there is a rule in giving which is 
often overlooked by those whose generosity 
is not sufficiently thoughtful and severe. 
Generosity comes to be perverted from its 
uses when it ministers to selfishness in others; 
and it should be our care to give all needful 
support to our neighbour. in his self-denial, 
rather than to bait a trap for his self-indul- 
gence ; in short, to give him pleasure only 
when it will do him good, not when sacrifices 
on our part are the correlatives of abuses 
on his ; for he who pampers the selfishness 
of another, does that other a moral injury 
which cannot be compensated by any amount 
of gratification imparted to him. 

" Give thou to no man, if thou wish him well, 
What he may not in honour's interest take ; 
Else shalt thou but befriend his faults, allied 
Against his better with his baser self." 

Amongst the questionable acts which are 
done from generous motives, is the not un- 
common one of a son and heir in tail paying 
the debts of a prodigal father deceased, out of 
property which the father had no right to 



OF MONEY. 25 

appropriate. There may be instances in 
which such nn act would be worthy of all 
praise ; but perhaps the cases are not few 
in which the effect is purely pernicious, 
enabling a spendthrift to squander another's 
inheritance in addition to his own; for the 
frequency of the practice leads money-lenders 
and others to calculate on the chances. 

The motive of the son is the pious and 
commendable one of shielding a parent's 
memory from disgrace. But how far is this 
end accomplished ? The selfishness which is 
the ground of disgrace, is the same whether 
it be the heir or the creditor that suffers by 
it. The heir may suffer in silence, and the 
sting of personal damage may make the 
creditor cry out; but in every just judgment 
the shame and dishonour attaching to the 
memory of the dead man should be measured 
by what he did when he was alive, and not 
by the silence or outcry ensuing; and it is 
hardly a high view of moral assoilment, which 
can regard with much complacency the mere 
stifling of reproaches and hushing up of a 



26 OF MONEY. 

* 

parent's memory. In many cases, therefore, 
the weak and careless, or interested and 
usurious creditor, should be left to bear his 
loss when his debtor dies insolvent. Still 
our philosophy is not to put Nature out of 
office ; and if the prodigality of the parent 
have been merely one of the infirmities of 
" a frail good man/' and if the conduct of 
the creditor have not been grossly culpable, 
natural feeling should take its course, and 
the blessing will be upon Shem and Japhet 
rather than upon Ham. 

Fifthly : — As to lending and borrowing. 

Never lend money to a Mend, unless you 
are satisfied that he does wisely and well in 
borrowing it. Borrowing is one of the most 
ordinary ways in which weak men sacrifice 
the future to the present, and thence is it 
that the gratitude for a loan is so proverbially 
evanescent : for the future, becoming present 
in its turn, will not be well-pleased with 
those who have assisted in doing it an injury. 
By conspiring with your friend to defraud 
his future self, you naturally incur his future 



OF MONEY. 27 

displeasure. Take to heart, therefore, the 
admonition of the ancient courtier : — 

" Neither a borrower nor a lender be ; 
For loan oft loseth both itself and friend, 
And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry. 5 '* 

To withstand solicitations for loans is often 
a great trial of firmness ; the more especially 
as the pleas and pretexts alleged are gene- 
rally made plausible at the expense of truth ; 
for nothing breaks down a man's truthfulness 
more surely than pecuniary embarrassment — 

" An unthrift was a liar from all time ; 
Never was debtor that was not deceiver.''" 

The refusal which is at once the most safe 
from vacillation, and perhaps as little apt to 
give offence as any, is the point blank refusal, 
without reasons assigned. Acquiescence is 
more easily given in the decisions of a strong 
will, than in reasons, which weak men, under 
the bias of self-love, will always imagine 
themselves competent to controvert. 

* Shakespeare. 
c 2 



28 OF MONEY. 

Some men will lend money to a friend in 
order, as it were, to purchase a right of 
remonstrance : but the right so purchased is 
worth nothing. You may buy the man's ears, 
but not his heart or his understanding. 

I have never known a debtor or a prodigal 
who was not, in his own estimation, an injured 
man ; and I have generally found that those 
who had not suffered by them were disposed to 
side with them ; for it is the weak who make 
the outcry, and it is by the outcry that the 
world is wont to judge. They who lend money 
to spendthrifts should be prepared, therefore, 
to suffer in their reputation as w T ell as in 
their purse. Let us learn from the Son of 
Sirach : — " Many, when a thing was lent 
them, reckoned it to be found, and put them 
to trouble that helped them. Till he hath 
received he will kiss a man's hand; and 
for his neighbour's money he will speak 
submissly ; but when he should repay, he will 
prolong the time, and return words of grief, 
and complain of the time. If he prevail he 
shall hardly receive the half, and he will 



OF MONEY. 29 

count as if he had found it ; if not, he hath 
deprived him of his money, and he hath 
gotten him an enemy without cause : he 
payeth him with cursing and railings, and for 
honour he will pay him disgrace." 

It is a common reproach with which man- 
kind assails mankind, that those who fall 
into poverty are forsaken by their friends : — 

" Ay, quoth Jacques, 
Sweep on, you fat and greasy citizens ; 
'Tis just the fashion : wherefore do you look 
Upon that poor and broken bankrupt there ?"* 

But before the friends of the poor be con- 
demned, it would be well to inquire whether 
their poverty have been honestly come by; and 
I believe it would very rarely be found that a 
person in a fair condition of life is allowed to 
sink unassisted into extreme indigence with- 
out some serious fault and offence : and the 
person having so sunk, it will be found to be 
still more rarely the case that the pressure 
of poverty is not too strong for his character. 

* " As You Like it," Act ii. Scene 1. 



30 OF MONEY. 

It is when the character has given way, that 
poverty is deserted: for pity and affection 
divorced from respect, lose the main element 
of their strength and permanency. 

The ordinary course of things, then, is as 
follows : — A becoming embarrassed, through 
some (perhaps venial) imprudence, is kindly 
assisted by his friends, B, C, and D ; who, 
however, do not altogether approve his con- 
duct, but think it would be ungenerous in 
them, under the protection of the favours they 
are conferring, to assail him with reproaches. 
So far all goes smoothly between A on the 
one hand, and B, C, D, on the other. But 
A, having, by the loans he has received, staved 
off any immediate consequences of his im- 
prudence, is under a rather stronger tempta- 
tion than before to forego the severe self- 
denial which would set him right again. He 
has now broken the ice in the matter of 
asking favours: he has incurred whatever 
humiliation belongs to it ; and having begged 
once, it costs him comparatively little to beg 
again. This process of begging and borrow- 



OF MONEY. 31 

ing goes on therefore, becoming continually 
more frequent and less efficacious ; and as the 
borrower grows less and less scrupulous, he 
nourishes his pride (the ordinary refuge of 
those w r ho lose their independence) and 
resents every repulse as an insult. B, C, 
and D then discover that they are not to be 
thanked for what they have lent, but rather 
reproached for not lending more and more ; 
whereupon they withdraw their friendship; 
and those who ignorantly look on, or perhaps 
hear the story of A, whilst B, C, and D are 
silent out of consideration for him, make 
remarks on inconstancy in friendship and 
the manner in which men are forsaken in 
their adversity and distress. 

The desertion by friends, however well 
merited, leads the embarrassed man to con- 
sider himself as a castaway, and throw him- 
self into still more reckless and shameless 
courses ; and on the part of men in this condi- 
tion there is sometimes seen a perfect infa- 
tuation of extravagance, which seems to 
proceed from the delusions of a disordered 



32 OF MONEY. 

mind and a sort of fascination in ruin. Such 
men come to have a repugnance to spare 
expense, because it brings the feeling of their 
difficulties home to them ; and a relief in pro- 
fuseness, because it seems for the moment to 
renounce the very notion of embarrassment. 
The end may be short of the gallows (for in 
our days the gallows has fallen out of favour), 
but it will scarcely be short of a punishment 
worse than death : for men will not tolerate 
in its necessary consequences that to which 
they are very indulgent in its inchoation ; and 
the " unfortunate debtor " who was cockered 
with compassion whilst he was in that stage 
of his existence, is regarded with just indig- 
nation and abhorrence when he has passed 
into that of the desperate outcast : though it 
may be as much in the course of nature that 
the one stage should follow the other, as that 
a tadpole, if he lives, should grow to be a toad. 
Creditors have always been an obnoxious 
people, and in divers times and countries the 
laws which have awarded imprisonment for 
insolvent debt have shared in their unpopu- 



OF MONEY. 33 

larity. But when we trace debt in its conse- 
quences and look to all the social evils which 
have their root in it, and when we consider 
that in moral as well as in physical thera- 
peutics, the principle of withstanding com- 
mencements is all-important, we may well, 
I think, bring ourselves to believe that insol- 
vent debt should be regarded as presumably 
criminal, and unless proved to be otherwise, 
should fall within the visitations of penal 
law. 

There remains only to be considered, 
Sixthly : — The subject of bequeathing : and 
some topics which might have fallen under 
this head have been anticipated in treating 
of motives for saving. 

To make a will in one way or another is of 
course the duty of every person whose heir- 
at-law is not the proper inheritor of all he 
possesses : and unless where there is some 
just cause for setting them aside, expectations 
generated by the customs of the world are 
sufficient to establish a moral right to inherit 
and to impose a corresponding obligation to 
c3 



34 OF MONEY. 

bequeath. For custom may be presumed, in 
the absence of any reasons to the contrary, 
to have grown out of some natural fitness ; 
and at all events it will have brought about 
an amount of adaptation which is often 
sufficient, as regards individual cases, to make 
a fitness where there was none. Unless in 
exceptional instances, therefore, in which 
special circumstances are of an over-ruling 
force, the disappointment of expectations 
growing out of custom is not to be inflicted 
without some very strong and solid reasons 
for believing that the custom needs to be 
reformed. If there be such reasons, by all 
means let the custom be disregarded, all ex- 
pectations to the contrary notwithstanding — 

" What custom wills, in all things should we do 't, 
The dust on antique time would lie unswept, 
And mountainous error be too highly heaped 
For truth to overpeer." * 

But the presumption should be always held 
to be in favour of custom, and he who de- 

* "■ Coriolanus," Act ii. Scene 3. 



OF MONEY. 35 

parts from it without the plea of special 
circumstances, should be able to find in 
himself a competency to correct the errors of 
mankind. 

If it be not well for the natural or cus- 
tomary heirs that they should be disap- 
pointed, neither is it good for those to whom 
an inheritance is diverted, that wealth should 
come upon them by surprise. Sudden and 
unexpected accessions of wealth seldom pro- 
mote the happiness of those to whom they 
accrue; and they are for the most part 
morally injurious ; especially when they ac- 
crue by undue deprivation of another. 

But some part of the property of most 
people, and a large part, or even the whole of 
the property of some people, may not be the 
subject of just or natural expectations on 
the part of customary heirs ; and in respect of 
such property there is a great liberty of judg- 
ment on the part of the testator, though it is 
to be a grave and responsible, not a capricious 
liberty. The testator has to consider to 
whom the property will bring a real increase 



36 OF MONEY. 

of enjoyment without increase of temptation ; 
and in whose hands it is likely most to pro- 
mote the happiness of others. In general 
the rule of judgment should be to avoid lift- 
ing people out of one station into another; 
and to aim at making such moderate addi- 
tions to moderate fortunes. in careful hands 
as may not disturb the proportion of property 
to station, — or still better, may rectify any 
disproportion, and enable those wiio are 
living with a difficult frugality to live with 
a free frugality. 

This rule is not, I fear, very generally 
regarded ; for mere rectitude, and the obser- 
vance of measures and proportions, does not 
much lay hold of the minds of men. On the 
contrary, there is a general disposition to add 
to anything which affects the imagination by 
its magnitude; and there is also in some 
people a sort of gloating over great wealth, 
which infects them with a propensity to feed 
a bloated fortune. Jacques took note of this 
when he saw the deer that was weeping in 
" the needless stream " : — 



ON MONEY. 37 

" Thou mak'st a testament 
As worldlings do, giving thy sum of more 
To that which had too much." * 

Thus it is that in the most solemn acts which 
men have to perform in the management of 
their money — in those too from which selfish 
ends seem most removed — they will often 
appear to be as little sensible of moral 
motives and righteous responsibilities as in 
any other transactions ; and even a testator 
jamjam moriturus will dictate his will with 
a sort of posthumous cupidity, and seem to 
desire that his worldliness should live after 
him. 

* " As You Like it," Act ii. Scene 1. 



OF HUMILITY AND INDEPENDENCE. 

I propose to treat of these jointly, because 
I regard them as inseparably connected in 
life. We shall find, I think, on looking below 
the surface, that Humility is the true mother 
and nurse of Independence ; and that Pride, 
which is so often supposed to stand to 
her in that relation, is, in reality, the step- 
mother, by whom is wrought — novercalibus 
odiis — the very destruction and ruin of Inde- 
pendence. 

For pride has a perpetual reference to the 
estimation in which we are holden by others ; 
fear of opinion is of the essence of it ; and 
with this fear upon us it is impossible that 
we should be independent. The proud man is 
of all men the most vulnerable ; and as there 
is nothing that rankles and festers more than 



HUMILITY AND INDEPENDENCE. 39 

wounded pride, he has much cause for fear. 
Pride, therefore — whether active or passive 
— whether it goes forth to claim the defer- 
ence of mankind, or secludes itself from the 
danger of their disrespect — has always much 
at stake, and leads a life of caution and soli- 
citude. Humility, on the contrary, has no 
personal objects, and leads its life in "the 
service which is perfect freedom." 

An uneasy, jealous, or rebellious feeling in 
regard to ranks and degrees, argues this want 
of independence through defect of humility. 
It is the feeling of a man who makes too 
much account of such things. A begrudging 
of rank and station, and refusal of such 
deference as the customs of the world have 
conceded to them, will generally be found to 
proceed from the man who secretly over- 
values them, and who, if himself in posses- 
sion of them, would stretch his pretensions 
too far. For plebeian pride and aristocratic 
pride issue from one and the same source in 
human nature. An illiberal self-love is at 
the bottom of both. 



40 HUMILITY AND INDEPENDENCE. 

When low-born men of genius, like Burns 
the poet, maintain the superiority of intrinsic 
worth to adventitious distinction, we can 
readily go along with them so far : but when 
they reject the claims of social rank and 
condition in a spirit of defiance and resent- 
ment, as if suffering a personal injury, we 
may very well question whether they have 
not missed of the independence at which 
they aimed : for had their independence been 
genuine, they would have felt that all they 
possessed which was valuable was inalien- 
able ; and having nothing to lose by the social 
superiority of the better born, they would 
have made them welcome to it as being 
perhaps a not inequitable compensation for 
the comparatively small share bestowed on 
them of intellectual gifts and abilities. 

If equality be what these men of in- 
dependence would contend for, it can only 
be had (if at all) by the balance of what is 
adventitious : for natural equality there is 
none. If personal merit be what they regard, 
this, at least, will not found any claim for 



HUMILITY AND INDEPENDENCE. 41 

intellectual endowments to be preferred to 
accidents of station. There is no more of 
personal merit in a great intellect than in a 
great estate. It is the use which is made of 
the one and of the other, which should found 
the claim to respect ; and the man who has it 
at heart to make the best use he can of either, 
will not be much occupied with them as a 
means of commanding respect. Thus it is 
that respect is commonly least due, as well 
as least willingly accorded, where it is arro- 
gated most, and that independence is hardly 
possessed where it is much insisted on. 
" The proud man," says St. Jerome, " (who 
" is the poor man) braggeth outwardly, but 
" beggeth inwardly." The humble man, who 
thinks little of his independence, is the man 
who is strong in it ; and he who is not solici- 
tous of respect will commonly meet with as 
much as he has occasion for. " Who calls ? " 
says the old shepherd in "As You Like it;" 
" Your betters," is the insolent answer : and 
what is the shepherd's rejoinder? "Else 
" are they very wretched." By what retort, 



42 HUMILITY AND INDEPENDENCE. 

reprisal, or repartee, could it have been made 
half so manifest that the insult had lighted 
upon armour of proof? Such is the invincible 
independence of humility, 

The declaration of our Saviour that the 
meek shall inherit the earth, may be under- 
stood, I think, as verified in the very nature 
and attributes of meekness. The dross of 
the earth the meek do not inherit; the 
damnosa hcereditas of the earth's pomps and 
vanities descends to others : but all the true 
enjoyments, the wisdom, love, peace, and 
independence, which earth can bestow, are 
assured to the meek as inherent in their 
meekness. " ; Tis in ourselves that we are 
" thus or thus." It depends on our own 
hearts to cast off the bondage of pride with 
all its chains and sores, and by meekness to 
possess the earth. For this possession comes 
not by observation and saying "Lo ! here, or 
Lo ! there : " * But as the Kingdom of God 
is within us, so also is the inheritance of 
the Earth : 



* Luke xvii, 21. 



HUMILITY AND INDEPENDENCE. 43 

" How much that Genius boasts as her's 

And fancies her's alone, 
On you, Meek Spirits, Faith confers ! 

The proud have further gone, 
Perhaps, through life's deep maze, but you 
Alone possess the labyrinth's clue. 

"To you the costliest spoils of thought, 

Wisdom, unclaimed, yields up ; 
To you the far-sought pearl is brought, 

And melted in your cup ; 
To you her nard and myrrh she brings, 
Like orient gifts to infant kings. 

" The single eye alone can see 

All truths around us thrown, 
In their eternal unity ; 

The humble ear alone 
Has room to hold, and time to prize, 
The sweetness of life's harmonies." * 

If distinctions of rank, order, and degree 
were of no other use in the world, they might 
be desired for the exercise which they give 
to a generous humility, on the part of those 
who have them and of those who have them 
not. The inequality of relation should culti- 
vate this virtue on both sides ; those who have 

* Aubrey De Vere ; Waldenses, and other Poems, p. 165. 



44 HUMILITY AND INDEPENDENCE. 

the superiority being disposed to prize it at 
no more than its worth ; those who have it 
not, being glad to recognise superiority in 
others, even in this its least substantial 
form — 

" Cloth of gold, be not too nice, 
Though thou be match' d with cloth of frieze ; 
Cloth of frieze, be not too bold, 
Though thou be match'd with cloth of gold." * 

Here are two humilities enjoined ; that which 
in a superior forgets superiority — that which 
in an inferior remembers inferiority : and 
neither could have place without difference 
of rank and degree. 

When the social distinctions indicate power 
and a governing authority, the relations be- 
tween the parties are still more pregnant with 
occasions for the exercise of humility. From 
humility there will result, not only on the one 
side a generous care and consideration in the 
use of power, but likewise on the other, what 
may be called a generous submission. For 
though the world may be more aware of 



* Old Saw. 



HUMILITY AND INDEPENDENCE. 45 

generosity shown in the exercise of power, 
there is a generosity also in the spirit of obe- 
dience, when it is cordial, willing, and free ; 
and this is the case only when the nature is 
humble. 

It is indeed chiefly in our intercourse with 
equals and superiors that our humility is put 
to the proof. When the " Servus Serwrum " 
at Rome washes, according to annual usage, 
the feet of some poor pilgrims, the ceremony, 
if it be held to typify humility, should at the 
same time be understood to be typical of the 
easiest of all humilities. If the same person- 
age were to hold the stirrup of an emperor, 
the proceeding would be typical of another 
degree of humility, — and one to which the 
Potentates of the Earth could not bear witness 
in his predecessors. Many people are gentle 
and forbearing with those placed under them, 
but proud and quarrelsome in their dealings 
with those above them. Where humility is 
wanting, there may be much submission 
without generosity, or, on the other hand, 
much resistance without an independent 



46 HUMILITY AND INDEPENDENCE. 

spirit. The disposition to submit to autho- 
rity unduly, and where the interests of 
others or our own are unjustly injured, 
will never arise out of humility; it will 
always arise out of those worldly anxieties 
from which the humble heart is exempt. 
The disposition to resist authority from per- 
sonal feelings, where no duty dictates the 
resistance, will never proceed from a genu- 
ine spirit of independence; for the heart 
is not independent which is engaged in a 
struggle for personal objects. And whether 
submitting or resisting, humility and inde- 
pendence will still be found to go together ; 
but they will for the most part be found to be 
favoured by submission ; for the pride of the 
human heart, which is commonly called up by 
resistance even when not undue, is in like 
manner abated by submission, even when 
carried too far ; and wherever pride is abated, 
the heart is raised and purified and made 
free. Elevation, therefore, is chiefly to be 
found in submission—" Govern them and lift 
them up." 



HUMILITY AND INDEPENDENCE. 47 

Humility, like most other virtues, has its 
credit a good deal shaken by the number of 
counterfeits that are abroad. Amongst the 
false humilities by which the world is most 
nattered and beguiled, is that of the pro- 
fessor in this kind who shrinks from all 
censure and reprobation of what is evil, 
under cover of the text, "Judge not lest 
ye be judged ;" as if it were the intent of 
that text, not to warn us against rash, pre- 
sumptuous and uncharitable judgments, but 
absolutely to forbid our taking account of the 
distinction between right and wrong. " It is 
not for us to judge our brother," says the 
humilitarian of this way of thinking ; " we 
know not how he may have been tempted ; 
perhaps he was born with stronger passions 
than other people ; it may have been that he 
was ill brought up ; peradventure he was 
thrown amongst evil associates ; we ourselves, 
had we been placed in the same circum- 
stances, might have been in like manner 
led astray." Such are the false charities of 
a false and popular humility. If we are 



48 HUMILITY AND INDEPENDENCE. 

to excuse all the moral evil that we can 
account for, and abstain from judging all 
of which we can suppose that there is 
some adequate explanation, where are we 
to stop in our absolutions? Whatever 
villany exists in the world is compounded 
of what is inborn and what comes by cir- 
cumstance : there is nothing so base or 
detestable but it is the consequence of some 
adequate cause ; and if we are to make 
allowances for all but causeless wickedness, 
there is an end of condemnation. 

The man of true humility, on the contrary, 
will not spare the vices and errors of bis 
fellow-creatures, any more than he would his 
own ; he will exercise manfully and without 
fear or favour, those judicial functions which 
God has committed in some greater or less 
degree to every member of the human com- 
munity ; but he will come to the task, on 
serious occasions, not lightly or unawed, but 
praying to have "a right judgment in all 
things f and whilst exercising that judgment 
in no spirit of compromise or evasion, he will 



HUMILITY AND INDEPENDENCE. 49 

feel that to judge his brother is a duty and 
not a privilege ; and he will judge him in 
sorrow, humbled by the contemplation of 
that fallen nature of which he is himself 
part and parcel. 

There is a current and a natural opinion, 
that a man has no right to censure in others 
a fault with which he is himself chargeable. 
But even this limitation is founded, I think, 
upon the same erroneous notion, of moral 
censure being an honourable privilege instead 
of a responsible function, a franchise instead 
of a due. No faults are better known and 
understood by us than those whereof we 
have ourselves been guilty; none, surely, 
should be so personally obnoxious to us as 
those by which we have ourselves been de- 
filed and degraded : and may we not, there- 
fore, be expected to be quick in perceiving 
them, and to regard them with a peculiar 
bitterness, rather than to overlook them in 
others ? I would answer, assuredly yes : but 
always with this proviso — that to bitterness 
of censure should be added confession and 



50 HUMILITY AND INDEPENDENCE. 

humiliation and the bitterness of personal 
shame and contrition. Without this the 
censure is not warrantable, because it is not 
founded upon a genuine moral sense; it is 
not, indeed, sincere : for though the offence 
may be worthy of all disgust and abhor- 
rence, that abhorrence and disgust cannot 
be really felt by those who have committed 
the like offence themselves without shame 
or repentance. 

Besides the false humility under cover of 
which we desert the duty of censuring our 
fellow-creatures, there are others by which 
we evade or pervert that of censuring our- 
selves. The most common of the spurious 
humilities of this kind, is that by which a 
general language of self-disparagement is sub- 
stituted for a distinct discernment and specific 
acknowledgment of our real faults. The 
humble individual of this class will declare 
himself to be very incontestably a miserable 
sinner; but at the same time there is no 
particular fault or error that can be imputed 
to him from which he will not find himself 



HUMILITY AND INDEPENDENCE. 51 

to be happily exempt. Each item is seve- 
rally denied ; and the acknowledgment of 
general sinfulness turns out to have been an 
unmeaning abstraction — a sum total of 
cyphers. It is not thus that the Devil makes 
up his accounts. 

Another way is to confess faults from 
which we are tolerably free, being perhaps 
chargeable with no larger a share of them 
than is common to humanity, whilst we pass 
over the sins which are more peculiarly and 
abundantly our own. Real humility will 
not teach us any undue severity, but truth- 
fulness in self-judgment. "My Son, glorify 
thy soul in meekness, and give it honour 
according to the dignity thereof.""' 5 ' For undue 
self-abasement and self-distrust will impair 
the strength and independence of the mind, 
which, if accustomed to have a just satisfac- 
tion with itself where it may, will the better 
bear to probe itself, and will lay itself open 
with the more fortitude to intimations of its 

* Ecclesiasticus, x. 28. 
D 2 



52 HUMILITY AND INDEPENDENCE. 

weakness on points in which it stands truly 
in need of correction. No humility is 
thoroughly sound which is not thoroughly 
truthful. The man who brings misdirected 
or inflated accusations against himself, does 
so in a false humility, and will probably be 
found to indemnify himself on one side or 
another. Either he takes a pride in his 
supposed humility ; or escaping in his self- 
condemnations from the darker into the 
lighter shades of his life and nature, he plays 
at hide and seek with his conscience. 

And true humility, being a wise virtue, will 
deal more in self-examination and secret 
contrition than in confession. For confession 
is often a mere luxury of the conscience, — 
used as the epicures of ancient Rome would 
use an emetic and a warm bath before they 
sat down to a feast. It is often also a very 
snare to the maker of it, and a delusion 
practised on the party to whom it is made. 
For, first, the faults may be such as words 
will not adequately explain : secondly, the 
plea of" guilty " shakes judgment in her seat : 



HUMILITY AND INDEPENDENCE. 53 

thirdly, the indulgence shown to confession 
might be better bestowed on the shame 
which conceals ; for this tends to correction, 
whereas confession will many times stand 
instead of penitence to the wrong-doer ; and 
sometimes even a sorrowful penitence stands 
in the place of amendment, and is washed 
away in its own tears. 

There is a frivolous practice of confession, 
much used in certain classes of society, by 
which young ladies or others, in the earlier 
moments of a friendship, take out a license 
to talk of themselves. In the confessionals 
of the ball-room, much superfluity of naughti- 
ness is mutually disclosed, by persons who 
might have been better employed in dancing 
than in confessing. This needs not to be 
very severely noticed; yet it points to an 
infirmity against which it may be well to be 
on our guard ; and wiien the occasion is suffi- 
ciently serious, we should take care that our 
confessions are free from any egoistical taint. 

Of all false humilities the most false is to 
be found in that meeting of extremes wherein 



54 HUMILITY AND INDEPENDENCE. 

humility is corrupted into pride. John 
Wesley, when he was desirous to fortify his 
followers against ridicule, taught them to 
court it. " God forbid," said he, " that we 
should not be the laughing-stock of man- 
kind!" But it is through pride, and not 
in humility, that any man will desire to be a 
laughing-stock. And though it may seem at 
first sight that he has attained to an inde- 
pendence of mankind when he can brave 
their laughter, yet this is a fallacious appear- 
ance : it will be found that in so far as his 
humility was corrupted, his independence 
was undermined ; and whilst courting the 
ridicule of the world, he is in reality courting 
the admiration and applause of his party or 
sect, or fearing their rebuke. This is the 
dependence into which he has fallen, and 
there is probably no slavery of the heart 
which is comparable to that of sectarian 
pride. Moreover Mr. Wesley's followers doubt- 
less deemed that the laughers were in danger 
of hell-fire. Where then was their charity 
when they desired to be laughed at by all 



HUMILITY AND INDEPENDENCE. 55 

mankind ? Or if (without desiring it) they 
deem mankind, themselves only excepted, 
to be in so reprobate a state, that the 
religious must needs be a laughing-stock, — 
was this their humility ? I wish to speak of 
Mr. Wesley with respect, not to say reverence: 
but in this instance I think that his appeal 
was made to a temper of mind in his fol- 
lowers which was not purely Christian. It 
is not the meek who will throw out this sort 
of challenge and defiance: and it is pride 
and not humility which we shall find to lie 
at the bottom of any such ostentatious self- 
abasement — 

"For Pride, 

Which is the Devil's toasting-fork, doth toast 
Him brownest that his whiteness vaunteth most." 



OF CHOICE IN MARRIAGE. 

" What do you think of marriage ? " says 
the Duchess of Malfy in Webster's play, and 
Antonio answers — 

" I take it as those that deny purgatory ; 
It locally contains or heaven or hell ; 
There is no third place in it." 

When I was young and inexperienced in 
wives, I did not take the same view of mar- 
riage which Antonio took. I used to say 
that there were two kinds of marriages, w T ith 
either of which a man might be content ; the 
one " the incorporate existence marriage," the 
other "the pleasant additament marriage." 
For I thought that if a man could not com- 
mand a marriage by w^hich all interests would 
be deepened, all objects exalted, rewards 
and forfeitures doubled and far more than 



OF CHOICE IN MARRIAGE. 57 

doubled, and all the comparatives of life 
turned into superlatives, then there remained 
nevertheless a very agreeable kind of re- 
source, — a marriage, that is, in which one 
might live one's own substantive life with the 
additional embellishment of some graceful, 
simple, gay, easy-hearted creature, who would 
lie light upon the surface of one's being, be at 
hand whenever solitude and serious pursuits 
had become irksome, and never be in the way 
w T hen she was not wanted. Visions these are ; 
merely dreams of our Epicurean youth. There 
is no such wife, and marriage is what Antonio 
took it to be. 

And marriage being thus the highest stake 
on this side the grave, it seems strange that 
men should be so hasty in the choice of a wife 
as they sometimes are ; for if we look about us 
at those marriages in which men and women 
have chosen for themselves, we shall find 
that even where there has been no absolute 
passion to expedite the business, the choice 
has not alwa} r s been preceded by much deli- 
beration. Perhaps it is owing to that very 
d3 



58 OF CHOICE IN MARRIAGE. 

fact of the decision being so critical, that it is 
often a little hurried ; for when great interests 
are depending, we deliberate with an anxiety 
to avoid error which presently becomes too 
painful to be endured, and perhaps, also, too 
disturbing to be successful ; and it is at some 
crises of their fortunes that men in all times 
have been disposed to commit them to Provi- 
dence, under various forms of reliance, some 
religious, others superstitious. We are most 
sensible of the fallibility of human judg- 
ment in those matters in which it is most 
essential to judge well, and to the irreligious 
man, fate, destiny, chance, sortilege, the stars 
— anything seems more trustworthy ; whilst 
he who is not irreligious knows that what is 
done in faith will be justified in the fruits, be 
they sweet or bitter. The maid who "was 
married one morning as she went into the 
garden for parsley to stuff a rabbit," might 
have nothing to fear in marriage if she was one 
to whom all things work together for good. 

Men who know not in what to put trust will 
often fall into the fatal error of supposing that 



OF CHOICE IN MARRIAGE. 59 

some of the graver consequences of marriage 
are to be escaped by concubinage, — a sup- 
position from which, if there be no better 
monitor at hand, even the wisdom of this 
world might withhold them. Unless they 
be utterly heartless and worthless, they will 
find that the looser tie is not the lighter. 
Mistresses, if they have any hold on the 
affections, are generally more exacting than 
wives ; and with reason, for there will natu- 
rally be the most assertion of claims where 
there is the least ground for confidence. The 
claims strengthen with time, whilst the 
qualities for which mistresses are commonly 
chosen, and on which they depend for their 
charm, are proverbially perishable. Beauty 
and the vivacities of youth fall away as soon 
from the concubine as if she were a wife ; 
domestic cares and jealousies will accrue as 
readily in the one case as in the other ; and 
unless generosity be out of the question, and 
a man have so " corrupted his compassions " 
as to have deliberately determined to keep a 
woman's affections until thev should involve 



60 OF CHOICE IN MARRIAGE. 

the cares naturally belonging to the affections 
and then to cast them off, there is no one of 
the burthens, vexations, dues and responsibili- 
ties incident to marriage, which will not be 
felt with ten-fold force in concubinage. Such 
are the miscalculations of selfishness. A man 
thinks that he has hung a trinket round his 
neck, and behold ! it is a millstone. 

Whilst one man will be hurried into a 
marriage from the very painfulness of per- 
plexity, another will live and die a bachelor 
out of mere indecision. The latter case is the 
more rare, and requires a peculiar serenity of 
temper and strength of irresolution. But it 
can occur. And the cases occur very fre- 
quently in which a man misses, through 
indecision, the opportunity of making the 
marriage he would have liked best, and then, 
resolving to be indecisive no more, takes a 
wrong decision. So that having regard to 
the various sources from which error pro- 
ceeds in such matters, it may perhaps be 
reasonably doubted whether a passion, with 
all its impetuosities and illusions, affords, 



OF CHOICE IN MARRIAGE. 61 

comparatively speaking, an ill guidance ; and 
whether those who have surrendered to it 
might not have been as much misled had 
they proposed to themselves the task of 
making a calm and judicious choice. 

And indeed the seasonable time for the 
exercise of prudence is not so much in 
choosing a wife or a husband, as in choosing 
with whom you will so associate as to risk 
the engendering of a passion. Even in this 
choice the prudence should not be cold- 
blooded; for a cold-blooded choice of associates 
is likely to lead to a cold-blooded marriage. 
With the leanings and leaps of the heart in 
the new acquaintanceships of the young, there 
should be just so much prudence presiding 
as will turn them away from what there is 
reasonable ground for believing to be false, 
selfish, weak or vicious. There should be 
thus much and no more. If the taste and 
fancy are resisted upon grounds less sub- 
stantial than these, they are resisted by what 
is less worthy to prevail than they ; for the 
taste and fancy are by no means of small 



62 OF CHOICE IN MARRIAGE. 

account — they are indeed of all but para- 
mount importance — in human life and inter- 
course. The taste lies deep in our nature, 
and strikes the key-note with which outward 
circumstance is to harmonise. 

But if the taste be in truth a matter of 
such import and ascendancy in our life, it 
follows that we are deeply responsible for 
the formation of it. It is, like everything 
else in us, partly of Nature's fashioning, 
partly of our own ; and though it is to rest 
upon the foundation of our natural disposi- 
tions, it is to be built, not like a baby-house 
at our pleasure, but according to the laws and 
model of the great Architect, like a temple. 
If there can be little that is genial or cordial 
in our life, married or unmarried, unless the 
taste be indulged, for that very reason it 
behoves us so to raise and purify the taste 
as to be enabled to give way to it in safety 
and innocence — not certainly with a total 
abandonment or an absolute affiance — 
nothing short of perfection in taste could 
justify that — but with a trust proportioned 



OF CHOICE IN MARRIAGE. 63 

to the degree of purity and elevation which 
has been attained. According to this mea- 
sure our habitual propensities will be towards 
what is good ; whilst the habit of guarding 
and correcting the taste will prevail to some 
extent even over its more impassioned move- 
ments ; and if we are carried away by our 
fancy, we shall yet know whither we are 
going, and give some guidance as well as 
take some. 

Wealth and worldly considerations have a 
good deal to do with the choice made in most 
marriages; and though the taste which is 
under these influences will not be supposed 
to be very high, yet if it cannot be elevated, 
better that a man should take the lower 
course to which it points, than aim at what 
is above him. If his mind be habitually 
involved in worldly interests and pursuits, 
he has no right to suppose that by stepping 
aside from them on a single occasion, even 
though it be the most important of all occa- 
sions, he can place himself in a different order 
of beings, or bring himself into harmony with 



64 OF CHOICE IN MARRIAGE. 

what is high and free. What he has to do 
is to emancipate his mind if he can ; bnt if 
not, to marry according to the conditions of 
his slavery. For if he marries from a mere 
impulse of his higher mind, whilst he is still 
in habitual subjection to the lower, the 
impulse will pass away,. whilst the habit 
stands fast, and the man will find that he 
has introduced a discord into his life, or 
rather that he has composed it in the wrong 
key. The man who marries for money has 
one advantage over those who marry for 
other considerations ; he can know what he 
gets ; if he can feed upon husks and draff, 
it is competent to him to see that his trough 
is filled. 

But if marrying for money is to be jus- 
tified only in the case of those unhappy 
persons who are fit for nothing better, it does 
not follow that marrying without money is 
to be justified in others, — marrying, that is, 
without the possession or the fair prospect 
of a competency suited to their condition 
in life. What is to constitute such a 



OF CHOICE IN MARRIAGE. 65 

competency depends in a great measure on 
the prudence, independence, and strength 
in self-denial of the parties. Those who 
resolve to marry on very small means, 
against the wishes of their relatives and 
friends, should always consider that they 
are setting up a claim to an extraordinary 
share of these excellent virtues ; and they 
should not expect their claim to be readily 
acknowledged unless it be founded, not 
merely on good intentions, but on actual 
savings, on ascertained facts of frugality and 
habits of self-sacrifice. Without such habits, 
they may intend and profess what they 
please as to independence and self-reliance : 
the result will be that they have indulged 
their unworldly inclinations at the expense 
of others. 

Whether money have much to do with 
a marriage or little, proper marriage-settle- 
ments are of great importance. And whether 
or not they be insisted on by the woman's 
friends, no man should consider that his 
individual probity or good intentions are 



66 OF CHOICE IN MARRIAGE. 

to stand instead of what is just and right 
upon general principles, or that it can be 
otherwise than a disgrace to him to marry 
without divesting himself of all power which 
it is not right and just that he should possess. 
Many are the cases in which the settled 
money comes to be the only stay of the family, 
and this in itself is a strong reason for main- 
taining the principle of just marriage-settle- 
ments; but there are objects other than 
pecuniary and prudential which are effected 
by it. The negociations and transactions 
connected with marriage-settlements are 
eminently useful as searching character and 
testing affection, before an irrevocable step 
be taken. 

Rank and station have an influence which, 
though not very high or worthy, is to be 
regarded, I think, as somewhat less bare and 
poor than motives which are merely mer- 
cenary. There is something in differences 
of rank and degree which affects the imagi- 
nation, as everything does which is unfa- 
miliar ; and an imaginative person is perhaps 



OF CHOICE IN MARRIAGE. 67 

more apt to fall in love with what is either 
above him or below him in station, than with 
what is on a dead level with him. This, 
however natural, should be looked upon as a 
misdirection of the fancy; for any extreme 
inequality of station will commonly lead to 
sore trials in marriage. 

Beauty, in itself and of itself, has, I believe, 
less power in determining matrimonial choice 
than at first sight it might seem natural that 
it should have. The charm of mere physical 
and corporeal beauty is perhaps too open 
and immediate to involve consequences ; its 
first effect is too strong in proportion to its 
further effects: for the imagination of man 
wishes to feel that it has something to come 
to ; and there is a charm more insidiously 
winning in that which turns to beauty as you 
advance, than in that which declares itself 
as beauty from the first. 

Lord Bacon has said that "there is no 
excellent beauty without some strangeness in 
the proportion ; " from which I infer that the 
beauty which had individuality was alone 



68 OF CHOICE IN MARRIAGE. 

excellent in his eyes ; and I believe this to be 
so far prevalent amongst mankind, that whilst 
the name of beauty is given to perfection of 
symmetry, the power of beauty is felt in a 
slight deviation from it — just sufficient to 
individualise without impairing. It is this 
peculiarity, this "some strangeness," which 
lays hold of the imagination. 

But even when such a hold has been taken, 
the first feelings are those of admiration 
rather than love, and there must be some- 
thing in the beauty indicating something 
besides the beauty, in order that the admira- 
tion may pass into love. If other forces are 
behind, admiration is an excellent herald and 
harbinger of love ; if not, admiration will not 
of itself constitute love ; indeed, wiiere the 
passion of love has attained to its full force, 
admiration will sometimes be almost lost and 
absorbed : " She loved too deeply to admire," 
said one lady writing of another some thirty 
years ago. 

It is commonly said that beauty, howsoever 
enchanting before marriage, becomes a matter 



OF CHOICE IN MARRIAGE. 69 

of indifference after. But if the beauty be 
of that quality which not only attracts 
admiration, but helps to deepen it into love, 
I am not one of those who think that what 
charmed the lover is forthwith to be lost 
upon the husband. It is doubtless a ques- 
tion of kind. There may be much beauty, 
eminent in its way, which is but "the per- 
fume and suppliance of a minute ; " but there 
exists also a species and quality of beauty, 
the effect whereof (as I conceive) it would 
not be possible for daily familiarity to 
deaden, and the power whereof may be 
expected to last as long as the beauty itself 
lasts, and perhaps much longer. Pictures 
and statues wrought by the more spiritual 
masters of art, do not satiate the sense ; and 
if in that beauty which is of art's creation, 
when the art is of the highest order, there is 
this cleaving and abiding power, we are not 
to doubt that Nature, which creates the art, is 
competent to create without the intervention 
of the art, a beauty expressed in flesh and 
blood, that may be constantly lived with 



70 OF CHOICE IN MARRIAGE. 

and daily dwelt upon, yet be found to be not 
less inexhaustible in its charm. Other objects 
will intervene, no doubt, where beauty is pre- 
sent to our daily life ; a man cannot be con- 

i 

sciously and continually occupied with such 
impressions ; insusceptible moods will inter- 
vene also, and the perceptions will from time 
to time be overclouded ; this will be the case 
in regard to works of art, and even in regard 
to those natural and universal sources from 
which the sense of beauty in man is nou- 
rished as with its daily food ; nor can it be 
otherwise in regard to human beauty: but 
when this beauty is pure and spiritual, I see 
no reason to suppose that it will be a less per- 
manent source than those others ; and I will 
not consent to believe that daily familiarity 
with it will make it of no effect, any more 
than that the flowers will cease to please 
because they hang over our doors, or the 
stars because they shine nightly. 

The exception to be taken to beauty as a 
marriage portion, (if it be beauty of the 
highest order,) is not therefore that it can 



OF CHOICE IN MARRIAGE. 71 

become otherwise than precious whilst it 
lasts, but rather that, as it is precious so is 
it perishable, and that, let it be valued as it 
may, it must be accounted at the best but a 
melancholy possession : — 

" For human beauty is a sight 
To sadden rather than delight ; 
Being the prelude of a lay 
Whose burthen is decay." 

And if it be our fortune to encounter in flesh 
and blood a beauty which seems to revive 
for us the realities from which Rafaello and 
Perugino painted, we are to consider whether 
to possess such beauty in marriage and see 
it subjected to the changes and chances of 
this mortal life, would not bring upon us the 
same sort of feeling with which we should 
contemplate a Madonna or a St. Cecilia hang- 
ing exposed to the weather and losing some 
tenth part of its form and colouring with 
each successive winter. 

I have said that, considering the many 
misguidances to which a deliberative judg- 
ment is exposed in the matter of marriage, 



72 OF CHOICE IN MARRIAGE. 

there may often be less risk of error in a 
choice which is impassioned. But I ought 
perhaps to have explained that by a passion 
I do not mean — what young ladies sometimes 
mistake for it — a mere imaginative sentiment, 
dream, or illusion. Such imaginative senti- 
ments, dreams, or illusions, not only do not 
constitute a passion, but they commonly 
render the person who indulges them incapa- 
ble of conceiving one; they bring out a 
strong fancy perhaps, but a weak and wasted 
heart. This is well understood by worldly 
mothers, who will rather promote than dis- 
courage a rapid succession of such sentiments, 
resting upon the maxim that there is safety 
in numbers. In destitution there is security 
from arrest, in nakedness there is security 
from a rending of garments, and in this 
beggary of the heart there is security from 
a passion. 

But if the heart have been trained in the 
way that it should go, the passion to which 
it will lie open will be something very different 
from a warm illusion or a sentimental dream, 



OF CHOICE IN MARRIAGE. 73 

though very possibly including these, and 
having begun in them. For true love is not, 
I think, that isolated and indivisible unity 
which it might be supposed to be from the 
way in which it is sometimes spoken of. It 
is mixed and manifold according to the abun- 
dance of the being, and in a large nature 
becomes in its progress a highly composite 
passion; commonly, no doubt, having its 
source in admiration and imaginative senti- 
ment, but as it rolls on, involving divers tribu- 
taries, swollen by accessory passions, feelings, 
and affections, — pity, gratitude, generosity, 
loyalty, fidelity, anxiety, fear, and devotion, 
— and deepened by the embankments of duty 
and justice — foreign to the subject as these 
last may seem to some. In short, the whole 
nature and conscience being worked upon 
by this passion, re-act upon it and become 
interfused and blended with it ; not by an 
absorption of all elements into one, but 
by a development of each into each: and 
when, therefore, I affirm that passion, err 
though it may, will be often less misleading 



74 OF CHOICE IN MARRIAGE. 

than the dispassionate judgment, I do but 
aver that the entire nature — reason, con- 
science, and affections, interpenetrating and 
triune, — that this totality of the nature, 
raised, vivified, and enlarged by love — is less 
likely to take an erroneous direction than a 
part of the nature standing aloof and dictat- 
ing to the other parts. 

I say not, however, that the risk is small 
in either case or under any guidance. Far 
from it. And the preference to be given to 
passion as a guide, will depend upon the 
natural capabilities, and the maturity and 
cultivation of the moral, spiritual, and intel- 
lectual mind. If there be much of this for 
the passion to call out, it will be an exalted 
and enlightened passion, and may see its way. 
If there be little, it will be a blind passion. 
Whence it follows that passion is not to be 
taken for a guide in extreme youth ; in the 
rawness of the moral and spiritual elements, 
and the greenness of the judgment. And as 
it is in these days that a first passion will 
most frequently take place, it will generally 



OF CHOICE IN MARRIAGE. 75 

be found, I believe, that a second may be 
better trusted. 

If, however, I maintain that passion in one 
season or another of our soul's progress, is to 
have a voice of much force and potency in the 
direction of the judgment, and will enlighten 
it on some points more than it may bedarken 
it on others, this is not because I imagine 
that it can realise its illusions or establish its 
empire in marriage. Passion is of course 
designed by Nature to be transitory, — a 
paroxysm, — not a state. And then the ques- 
tion arises which has been so often agitated, 
whether the affection which succeeds marriage 
is in all cases much influenced — and if influ- 
enced, how influenced — by the nature of the 
feeling which preceded ? Whether a passion 
which has transmigrated into an affection 
carries with it into the affection any elements 
which could not exist in an affection other- 
wise originating ? When it begins with pas- 
sion, there must needs be a period of collapse 
and regurgitation, or at least of subsidence. 
Whether, therefore, is the affection the 



76 OF CHOICE IN MARRIAGE. 

weaker for never having known the high 
tide, or the stronger for not having felt the 
refluence? This temporary flooding of the 
affections, does it devastate as regards 
durable results, or does it enrich? 

I think that the predominance, amounting 
almost to universality, of the law of Nature 
which places us once in our lives at least 
under the dominion of this passion, would 
afford of itself a strong presumption that 
some beneficial result is to be brought about 
by it. And if it be admitted (as without any 
offence to Calvin I hope it well may), that 
the better part of most human beings is the 
larger part, it will follow that this temporary 
expansion and outburst of the whole of the 
being, will bring a greater accession of good 
activities than of bad ; and as the first cry of 
the infant is necessary to bring the lungs into 
play, so the first love of the adult may, 
through a transitory disturbance, be designed 
to impart a healthy action to the moral and 
spiritual nature. The better the tree, the 
better of course will be the fruits; neither 



OF CHOICE IN MARRIAGE 7 

the rains of spring nor the glow of summer 
will make grapes grow upon brambles ; but 
whatever the fruits may be, the yield will be 
larger after every seasonable operation of 
Nature has been undergone. With the few 
in whom envy, jealousy, suspicion, pride, and 
self-love are predominant, there may be an 
aggravation of these evil dispositions or of 
some of them ; but to them (and God be 
praised they are the many) with whom humi- 
lity, generosity, the love of God, and the love 
of God's creatures, though partly latent per- 
haps, is powerfully inherent, the passion of 
love will bring with it an enlargement and a 
deepening and strengthening of these better 
elements, such as no other visitation of merely 
natural influences, however favourably re- 
ceived and dutifully cherished, could avail to 
produce. And when the passion has passed 
away, the enlargement of the nature will 
remain ; and as the better and more abound- 
ing human being will make the better and 
more abounding husband or wife, so will the 
marriage which has been preceded by a passion, 



78 OF CHOICE IN MARRIAGE. 

be a better marriage — other things alike — 
than that which has not — more exalted, more 
genial, more affluent in affections. 

If the passion have ended, not in a marriage 
but in a disappointment, the nature, if it have 
strength to bear the pressure, will be more 
ennobled and purified by that than by success. 
Of the uses of adversity which are sweet, 
none are sweeter than those which grow out 
of disappointed love ; nor is there any greater 
mistake in contemplating the issues of life, 
than to suppose that baffled endeavours and 
disappointed hopes bear no fruits, because 
they do not bear those particular fruits which 
were sought and sighed for : — 

"The tree 
Sucks kindlier nurture from a soil enriched 
By its own fallen leaves ; and man is made, 
In heart and spirit, from deciduous hopes 
And things that seem to perish." 

Indeed the power and spiritual efficacy 
of love can hardly be realised to its full 
extent without either disappointment, or 
at least reverses, vicissitudes, and doubts; 



OF CHOICE IN MARRIAGE. 79 

and of the fact which Shakspeare observes, 
that 

" The course of true love never did run smooth," 

perhaps this explanation may be given, — that 
roughnesses are needful in order to make the 
love true ; and marriages that follow upon 
trouble, trial, and vicissitude, will be more 
likely to be conservative of the love by which 
they have been achieved, than those which 
are merely the crown or coronal of a triumphal 
career in courtship : 

" The flowers in sunshine gathered soonest fade." 

Amongst the obstructions which the course 
of love has commonly to encounter, one which 
is specified by Shakspeare is the opposition of 
parents ; and it is often one of the most per- 
plexing problems in human life to determine 
to what length parental opposition should 
proceed in such cases. A moderate opposi- 
tion can seldom do harm, unless there be 
positive perversity in the parties opposed, so 
that opposition shall be in itself a provocative 
to folly. Such perversity apart, a moderate 



80 OF CHOICE IN MARRIAGE. 

opposition will suffice to set aside a weak 
love, whilst it will tend to consolidate a strong 
one ; and it will thus act favourably in either 
case, so far as regards that most essential 
element in all such matters, — the weakness 
or strength of the affection. In respect of an 
opposition beyond this, it seems hardly pos- 
sible to generalise, the qualities of the persons 
and the specialties of the cases being so all- 
important. In extreme youth, obedience 
should be the rule of the child. But so soon 
as the child shall have attained to a fair 
maturity of judgment, there is a moral respon- 
sibility for the just exercise of that judgment 
which must not be overlaid by an exagge- 
rated notion of filial duty. Of the members 
of a family it is for the benefit of all that 
each should act upon each with some degree, 
though with very different degrees, of con- 
trolling influence. The sons and daughters, 
when children no longer, are to demean them- 
selves towards the parents with humility, 
deference, and a desire to conform, but not 
with an absolute subjection of the judgment 



OF CHOICE IN MARRIAGE. 81 

and the will. There is such a thing as a 
spoilt parent. On the question of choice in 
marriage, as on other questions in which 
both child and parent are personally con- 
cerned, if the child presumptuously conceive 
that his judgment is mature when it is not 
mature, or that it is worthy to be weighed 
with his parents' when it is not worthy, he is 
culpable of course ; being chargeable, not with 
mere error of judgment, but with the sin of 
presumption. On the other hand, if in all 
humility of heart and desire to be dutiful, he 
shall nevertheless clearly perceive, or think 
he perceives, that his judgment is the juster 
and is guided by higher, purer, and more 
righteous views of life, it behoves him, after 
much patience and the neglect of no endea- 
vour to bring about a coincidence of judg- 
ment, to resist his parents' judgment and 
give effect to that which he conceives to be 
better ; and this for his parents' sake as well 
as for his own. We all need resistance to 
our errors on every side. " Woe unto us when 
all men shall speak well of us !" and woe unto 
E 3 



82 OF CHOICE IN MARRIAGE. 

us also, when all men shall give way to us ! 
It may be a sacred duty on the part of a 
child to give a helpful resistance to a parent, 
when the parent is the more erring of the 
two ; and the want of such resistance, espe- 
cially on the part of daughters, (for they are 
more prone than sons to misconceive their 
duties of this kind, or to fail in firmness), has 
often betrayed a parent into fatal errors, 
followed by life-long remorse. Women, in 
a state of exaltation from excited feelings, 
imagining because duty often requires self- 
sacrifice, that when they are sacrificing them- 
selves they must needs be doing their duty, 
will often be capable of taking a resolution, 
when they are not capable of undergoing the 
consequences with fortitude. For it is one 
sort of strength that is required for an act of 
heroism ; another, and a much rarer sort, 
which is available for a life of endurance. 
Probably most people could quote instances 
within their own knowledge, in which the 
daughter has obeyed, and then losing her 
health, and with it perhaps her temper and 



OF CHOICE IN MARRIAGE. 83 

her resignation, has died of what is called a 
broken heart ; thus, as it were, heaping coals 
of fire upon the parents' head. 

But if an unreasonable opposition to a 
daughter's choice be not to prevail, I think 
that, on the other hand, the parents, if their 
views of marriage be pure from worldliness, 
are justified in using a good deal of manage- 
ment — not more than they very often do use, 
but more than they are wont to avow or than 
society is wont to countenance, — with a view 
to putting their daughters in the way of such 
marriages as they can approve. It is the 
way of the world to give such management 
an ill name, — probably because it is most used 
by those who abuse it to worldly purposes ; 
and I have heard a mother pique herself on 
never having taken a single step to get 
her daughters married, — which appeared to 
me to have been a dereliction of one of the 
most essential duties of a parent. If the 
mother be wholly passive, either the daugh- 
ters must take steps and use management 
for themselves (which is not desirable), or the 



84 OF CHOICE IN MARRIAGE. 

happiness and the most important interests 
of their lives, moral and spiritual, must be 
the sport of chance and take a course purely 
fortuitous : and in many situations, where 
unsought opportunities of choice do not 
abound, the result may be not improbably 
such a love and marriage as the mother and 
every one else contemplates with astonish- 
ment. Some such astonishment I recollect 
to have expressed on an occasion of the kind 
to an illustrious poet and philosopher, whose 
reply I have always borne in mind when 
other such cases have come under my obser- 
vation : — " We have no reason to be surprised, 
unless we knew what may have been the 
young lady's opportunities. If Miranda had 
not fallen in with Ferdinand, she would have 
been in love with Caliban." 

But management, if it is to be recom- 
mended, must be good management, and not 
the management by which young ladies are 
hurried from ball-room to ball-room, so that a 
hundred prelibations may give one chance to 
be swallowed. A very few ball-rooms will 



OF CHOICE IN MARRIAGE. 85 

afford the means of introduction and selec- 
tion of acquaintances; and the intercourse 
which, by imparting a real knowledge of the 
dispositions, will give the best facilities of 
choice, will be that which is withdrawn, by 
one remove and another, from gay metro- 
politan assemblies — first, to intercourse in 
country places ; secondly, to domestic society. 
Our present manners admit, perhaps, too 
much freedom of intercourse in public, too 
little in private. The light familiarity of 
festive meetings is carried far enough, further 
than tends to attach; but the graver intimacy 
is wanting. Milton complained that in his 
time choice in marriage was difficult, because 
there was not "that freedom of access, 
granted or presumed, as may suffice to a 
perfect discerning till too late."* In our age 
the freedom of access is sufficient ; but the 
access is, for the most part, at times and 
places where nothing can be discerned but 
the features of a restless and whirling life. 
And if Milton could say, "Who knows not 

* Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, ch. 3. 



86 OF CHOICE IN MARRIAGE. 

that the bashful muteness of a virgin may 
ofttimes hide all the unliveliness and natural 
sloth which is really unfit for conversation," 
we, on the other hand, who cannot reasonably 
complain of the bashful muteness of the 
virgins, may be in our own way perplexed 
in the attempt to discover what is the life 
that lies beneath those dancing and glancing 
outsides of which we see so much. But 
the difficulty of managing well in this 
respect depends less on our manners in 
regard to the intercourse between girls and 
men, than on the general mode of living, 
which, in some sections of society (not 
in all), tends to separate domestic from 
social life, and to subjugate the former to 
the latter. 

It may be observed, I think, that women 
of high intellectual endowments and much 
dignity of deportment, have the greatest 
difficulty in marrying, and stand most in 
need of a mother's help. And this, not be- 
cause they are themselves fastidious (for they 
are often as little so as any), but because 



OF CHOICE IN MARRIAGE. 87 

men are not humble enough to wish to have 
their superiors for their wives. 

Great wealth in a woman tends to keep at 
a distance both the proud and the humble, 
leaving the unhappy live-bait to be snapped 
at by the hardy and the greedy. If the 
wealthy father of an only daughter could be 
gifted with a knowledge of what parental 
care and kindness really is, it is my assured 
belief that he would disinherit her. If he 
leaves her his w r ealth, the best thing for her 
to do is to marry the most respectable per- 
son she can find of the class of men who 
marry for money. An heiress remaining 
unmarried is a prey to all manner of extor- 
tion and imposition, and with the best inten- 
tions becomes, through ill-administered expen- 
diture and misdirected bounty, a corruption 
to her neighbourhood and a curse to the poor ; 
or if experience shall put her on her guard, 
she will lead a life of resistance and suspicion, 
to the injury of her own mind and nature. 

In the case, therefore, of either high en- 
dowments or great wealth in a daughter, the 



88 OF CHOICE IN MARRIAGE. 

care of a parent is peculiarly needed to 
multiply her opportunities of making a good 
choice in marriage ; and in no case can such 
care be properly pretermitted. 

When the mother takes no pains, the mar- 
riage of the daughter, even if not in itself 
ineligible, is likely to be unduly deferred. 
For the age at which marriages are to be 
contracted is a very material consideration. 
Aristotle was of opinion that the bridegroom 
should be thirty-seven years of age and the 
bride eighteen ; alleging physical reasons 
which I venture to think exceedingly incon- 
clusive. Eighteen for the bride is the least to 
be objected to, and would yet be rather early 
in this climate. A girl of that age may be 
not absolutely unprepared for marriage ; but 
she has hardly had time for that longing and 
yearning affection which is to be her best 
security after. Sir Thomas More, in account- 
ing for Jane Shore's infidelity to her hus- 
band, observes, that "foreasmuche as they 
wer coupled ere she wer wel ripe, she not 
very fervently loved for whom she never 



OF CHOICE IN MARRIAGE. 89 

longed." But whether or not the girl be to 
be considered ripe at eighteen, I know no 
good reason, moral or physical, why the man 
should withhold himself till seven-and-thirty, 
and many excellent reasons against it. Some 
few years of seniority on the part of the man, 
I do conceive to be desirable ; and on this, as 
well as on other grounds, the woman should 
marry young ; for if the woman were to be 
past her first youth and the man to be some 
years older, it follows that the man would 
remain longer unmarried than it is good for 
him to be alone. On the point of seniority, 
let us listen to the Duke and Viola — 

Duke. " Let still the woman take 

An older than herself; so wears she to him, 
So sways she level in her husband's heart. 
For, boy, however we do praise ourselves, 
Our fancies are more giddy and unfirm, 
More longing, wavering, sooner lost and worn 
Than women's are. 

Viola. I think it well, my Lord. 

Dulce. Then let thy love be younger than thyself, 
Or thy affection cannot hold the bent : 
For women are as roses, whose fair flower 
Being once displayed, doth fall that very hour." * 

* " Twelfth Night," Act ii. Sc. 4. 



90 OF CHOICE IN MARRIAGE. 

The woman should marry, therefore, rather 
before than after that culminating period of 
personal charm, which, varying much in 
different individuals, is but a short period in 
any, and occurs in early youth in almost all. 
She should marry between twenty and thirty 
years of age, but nearer the former than the 
latter period. Now the man at such an age 
would probably be too light for the man's 
part in marriage ; and the more so when 
marrying a wife equally young. For when 
two very young people are joined together in 
matrimony, it is as if one sweet-pea should 
be put as a prop to another. The man, there- 
fore, may be considered most marriageable 
when he is nearer thirty than twenty, or 
perhaps when he is a little beyond thirty. If 
his marriage be deferred much longer, there 
is some danger of his becoming hardened in 
celibacy. In the case of a serious and 
thoughtful man, it need not be deferred so 
long ; for in such a case, a remark made in a 
letter of Lord Bacon's will probably be veri- 
fied — that a man finds himself seven years 
older the day after his marriage. 



OF CHOICE IN MARRIAGE. &1 

In these times men are disposed, I think, 
to be rather too tardy than too precipitate in 
marrying. Worldly prudence is strong in 
us now, even to a vice ; and a competency, 
or what is estimated to be a competency, is 
not attainable at a very early age. A circle 
of friends and relatives commonly resent, as 
an injury to themselves, a poor marriage con- 
tracted at an early age; and not without 
reason, if the virtues of the parties con- 
tracting it are not such as to justify it. But 
that will be prudence in a prudent man which 
is imprudence in another ; and one thing is 
certain, that the prudence which postpones 
marriage is excessive to a vice when it in- 
volves other vices, and presents temptations 
less likely to be resisted than those to which 
a poor marriage lies open. 

There are other motives and circumstances 
besides those connected with prudence, which, 
in the case of men, militate against early 
marriages. If their first passion (as it hap- 
pens with most first passions) have issued in 
a disappointment, and if they have passed 



92 OF CHOICE IN MARRIAGE. 

through their disappointment without being 
betrayed, by the heart's abhorrence of its 
vacuum, into some immediate marriage of 
the pis-aller kind, resorted to for mere pur- 
poses of repose, they will probably find that 
a first seizure of the kind guarantees them 
for a certain number of years against a 
second. In the meantime, the many interests, 
aspirations, and alacrities of youth, its keen 
pursuits and its fresh friendships, fill up the 
measure of life, and make the single heart 
sufficient to itself. It is when these things 
have partly passed away and life has lost 
something of its original brightness, that men 
begin to feel an insufficiency and a want. I 
have known it to be remarked by a Roman 
Catholic priest, as the result of much observa- 
tion of life amongst his brethren, that the 
pressure of their vow of celibacy was felt 
most severely towards forty years of age. 

If a man have fairly passed that period 
without marrying or attempting marriage, 
then, I think, or very soon after, he may con- 
clude that there is no better fortune in store 



OF CHOICE IN MARRIAGE. 93 

for him, and dispose himself finally for the 
life celibate. 

" Till age, refrain not ; but if old, refrain," 

says one of the shrewdest of the unpoetical 
poets * And this abstinence from marriage 
on the part of old men, is to be enjoined, not 
only on their own account, but on account of 
the offspring to which such marriages may 
give birth. The sort of age in youth and 
the weakness of constitution which is observ- 
able in the offspring of old men, involves 
national as well as individual evil, because it 
tends to degeneracy of the race ; and amongst 
the Romans, who were careful of their breed, 
there was a law, the Lex Pappia, which 
forbade the marriage of a man of more than 
sixty years of age with a woman of less than 
fifty. If the old man have male issue, there 
will generally be further the evils to the son 
of an ill-tended minority and a premature 
independence. 

The marriages of old men to young women 

* Crabbe. 



94 OF CHOICE IN MARRIAGE. 

are, for the most r part, as objectionable in 
their motives as in their results; and the 
mistake of such marriages is generally as 
great as the moral misfeasance. There is no 
greater error of age than to suppose that it 
can recover the enjoyment of youth by pos- 
sessing itself of what youth only can enjoy ; 
and age will never appear so unlovely as 
when it is seen with such an ill-sorted 
accompaniment — 

" A chaplet of forced flowers on Winter's brow 
Seems not less inharmonious to me 
Than the untimely snow on the green leaf." 

For the young women who make such 
marriages there is sometimes more to be said 
than for the old men. When the motives 
are mercenary there is nothing to be said 
for them; and but little when the case is 
one of weak consent to the mercenary base- 
ness of parents, or when they sacrifice them- 
selves (as they will sometimes allege) in a 
rich alliance for the relief of a large family 
of destitute brothers and sisters. These are 
but beggarly considerations, and might be 



OF CHOICE IN MARRIAGE. 05 

equally pled in defence of a less disguised 
prostitution. But a case will sometimes 
occur in which a young woman is dazzled 
by great achievements or renown ; and what 
is heroical or illustrious may inspire a feeling 
which, distinct though it be from that which 
youth inspires in youth, is yet not unimagi- 
native, and may suffice to sanctify the 
marriage vow. And there is another case, 
not certainly to be altogether vindicated and 
yet not to be visited with much harshness of 
censure, in which a woman who has had her 
heart broken, seeks, in this sort of marriage, 
such an asylum as, had she been a Roman 
Catholic, she might have found in a convent. 
Marriages of the old with the old are rare, 
and are thought by some people to be ridi- 
culous. They do not, however, fall within 
the purview of the Lex Pappia, or of any 
other prohibition that I am acquainted with, 
and I hardly know why they should be so 
unfrequent as they are. Solitude is ill suited 
to old age, and the course of circumstances 
tends too often to leave the old in solitude. 



96 OF CHOICE IN MARRIAGE. 

Cases must be continually occurring in which 
it would be for the comfort and happiness of 
old friends of different sexes to live together ; 
and if they cannot do so conveniently or 
creditably without being married, I know 
not why they should be laughed at for 
marrying. It must be, no doubt, a totally dif- 
ferent connection from that which is formed 
in earlier life ; and it is one which might be, 
perhaps, more fitly ratified by a civil con- 
tract than by a religious ceremony; but 
the lawful rights of a wife are necessary to 
the female friend, in order that she may be 
regarded with due respect by her husband's 
relatives and by the world, and in order that 
she may have authority in her household : 
and if the marriage be ascribed to this 
reasonable motive, instead of supposing any 
which would be unreasonable and ridiculous, 
it may be regarded, I think, as a wise and 
commendable species of arrangement. 



OF WISDOM. 



Wisdom is not the same with understand- 
ing, talents, capacity, ability, sagacity, sense, 
or prudence — not the same with any one of 
these ; neither will all these together make it 
up. It is that exercise of the reason into 
which the heart enters — a structure of the 
understanding rising out of the moral and 
spiritual nature. 

It is for this cause that a high order of 
wisdom — that is, a highly intellectual 
wisdom — is still more rare than a high 
order of genius. When they reach the very 
highest order they are one ; for each includes 
the other, and intellectual greatness is 
matched with moral strength. But they 
hardly ever reach so high, inasmuch as great 
intellect, according to the ways of Provi- 
dence, almost always brings along with it 



98 OF WISDOM. 

great infirmities — or, at least, infirmities 
which appear great owing to the scale of 
operation ; and it is certainly exposed to 
unusual temptations ; for as power and pre- 
eminence lie before it, so ambition attends it, 
which, whilst it determines the will and 
strengthens the activities, inevitably weakens 
the moral fabric. 

Wisdom is corrupted by ambition, even 
when the quality of the ambition is intellec- 
tual. For ambition, even of this quality, is 
but a form of self-love, which, seeking grati- 
fication in the consciousness of intellectual 
power, is too much delighted with the exer- 
cise to have a single and paramount regard 
to the end ; and it is not according to 
wisdom that the end — that is, the moral 
and spiritual consequences — should suffer 
derogation in favour of the intellectual 
means. God is love, and God is light; 
whence it results that love is light ; and it is 
only by following the effluence of that light, 
that intellectual power issues into wisdom. 
The intellectual power which loses that light 



OF WISDOM. 99 

and issues into intellectual pride, is out of 
the way to wisdom, and will not attain even 
to intellectual greatness. For though many 
arts, gifts, and attainments may co-exist in 
much force with intellectual pride, an open 
greatness cannot ; and of all the correspond- 
encies between the moral and intellectual 
nature, there is none more direct and imme- 
diate than that of humility with capacious- 
ness. If pride of intellect be indulged, it will 
mark out to a man conscious of great talents 
the circle of his own intellectual experiences 
as the only one in which he can keenly 
recognise and appreciate the intellectual uni- 
verse ; and there is no order of intellectual 
men which stands in a more strict limitation 
than that of the man who cannot conceive 
what he does not contain. Such men will 
oftentimes dazzle the world, and exercise in 
their day and generation much influence on 
the many whose range is no wider than 
theirs and whose force is less ; but the want 
of spiritual and imaginative wisdom will stop 
them there; and the understandings from 

F 2 

LOFC, 



100 OF WISDOM. 

which mankind will seek a permanent and 
authentic guidance, will be those which 
have been exalted by love and enlarged by 
humility. 

If wisdom be defeated by ambition and 
self-love when these are occupied with the 
mere inward consciousness of intellectual 
power, still more is it so when they are 
eager to obtain recognition and admiration of 
it from without. Men who are accustomed 
to write or speak for effect, may write or 
speak what is wise from time to time, because 
they may be capable of thinking and intel- 
lectually adopting what is wise : but they 
will not be wise men ; because the love of 
God, the love of man, and the love of truth 
not having the mastery with them, the growth 
and structure of their minds must needs be 
perverted if not stunted. Thence it is that 
so many men are observed to speak wisely 
and yet act foolishly ; they are not deficient 
in their understandings, but the wisdom of 
the heart is wanting to their ends and objects, 
and to those feelings which have the direction 



OF WISDOM. 101 

of their acts. And if they do speak wisely, 
it is not because they are wise ; for the per- 
manent shape and organisation of the mind 
proceeds from what we feel and do, and not 
from what we speak, write, or think. There 
is a great volume of truth in the admonition 
which teaches us that the spirit of obedience 
is to prepare the way, action to come next, 
and that knowledge is not precedent to these, 
but consequent : " Do the will of my Father 
which is in heaven, and thou shalt know of 
the doctrine." 

Those who are much conversant with intel- 
lectual men will observe, I think, that the 
particular action of self-love by which their 
minds are most frequently warped from 
wisdom, is that which belongs to a pride and 
pleasure taken in the exercise of the argu- 
mentative faculty; whence it arises that 
that faculty is enabled to assert a predomi- 
nance over its betters. With such men, the 
elements of a question which will make 
effect in argument, — those which are, so far 
as they go, demonstrative, — will be rated 



102 OF WISDOM. 

above their value ; and those which are matter 
of proportion and degree, not palpable, pon- 
derable, or easily or shortly producible in 
words, or which are matters of moral estima- 
tion and optional opinion, will go for less 
than they are worth, because they are not 
available to ensure the victory or grace the 
triumph of a disputant. 

In some discussions, a wise man will be 
silenced by argumentation, only because he 
knows that the question should be determined 
by considerations which lie beyond the reach 
of argumentative exhibition. And indeed, 
in all but purely scientific questions, argu- 
ments are not to be submitted to by the 
judgment as first in command; rather they 
are to be used as auxiliaries and pioneers ; 
the judgment should profit by them to the 
extent of the services they can render, but 
after their work is done, it should come to 
its conclusions upon its own free survey. 
I have seldom known a man with great 
powers of argumentation abundantly in- 
dulged, who could attain to an habitually 



OF WISDOM. 103 

just judgment. In our courts of law, where 
advocacy and debate are most in use, abi- 
lity, sagacity, and intellectual power flourish 
and abound, whilst wisdom is said to have 
been disbarred. In our houses of parlia- 
ment the case is somewhat otherwise; the 
silent members, and those who take but 
little part in debate, and indeed the coun- 
try at large which may be said to listen, 
exercise some subduing influence over the 
spirit of argumentation, and the responsi- 
bility for results restrains it, so that here 
its predominance is much less than in the 
courts of law; yet even in the houses of 
parliament wisdom has been supposed to 
have less to say to the proceedings than a 
certain species of courage. 

Ambition and self-love will commonly 
derange that proportion between the active 
and passive understanding which is essential 
to wisdom, and will lead a man to value 
thoughts and opinions less according to their 
worth and truth, than according as they are 
his own or another's. The objection made 



104 OF WISDOM. 

by Brutus to Cicero in the play, — that he 
"would never follow anything which other 
men began " — points to one corruption oper- 
ated by self-love upon a great understanding. 
Some preference a man may reasonably 
accord to what is the growth of his own 
mind apart from its absolute value, on the 
ground of its specific usefulness to himself ; 
for what is native to the soil will thrive 
better and bear more fruit than what has 
been transplanted : but, on the other hand, if a 
man would enlarge the scope and diversify the 
kinds of his thoughts and contemplations, he 
should not think too much to apprehend nor 
talk too much to listen. He should cherish 
the thoughts of his own begetting with a 
loving care and a temperate discipline — they 
are the family of his mind and its chief 
reliance — but he should give a hospitable 
reception to guests and to travellers with 
stories of far countries, and the family should 
not be suffered to crowd the doors. 

Even without the stimulant of self-love, 
some minds, owing to a natural redundance 



OF WISDOM. 105 

of activity and excess of velocity and fer- 
tility, cannot be sufficiently passive to be 
wise. A capability to take a thousand views 
of a subject is hard to be reconciled with 
directness and singleness of judgment ; and 
he who can find a great deal to say for any 
view, will not often go the straight road to 
the one view that is right. If subtlety be 
added to exuberance, the judgment is still 
more endangered — 

" Tell Wit how oft she wrangles 
l In tickel points of niceness, 
Tell Wisdom she entangles 
Herself in over-wiseness." * 

But when self-love is not at the root, there 
is better hope for wisdom. Nature presents 
us with various walks of intellectual life, and 
such a selection may be made as shall render 
a disproportion of the active to the passive 
intellect less dangerous* Speculative wisdom 
will suffer less by excess of thinking than 
practical wisdom. There are fields to be 
fought in which a wide range is more essential 

* Sir Walter Raleigh. 
f3 



106 OF WISDOM. 

than an unerring aim. In some regions we 
are to cultivate the surface; in others to 
sink the shaft. No one intellect can be 
equally available for opposite avocations, 
and where there is no interference of self- 
love, wisdom will be attained through a wise 
choice of work. One eminent man of our times 
has said of another, that " science was his 
forte, and omniscience his foible." But that 
instance was not an extreme one. Cases 
have occurred in which wisdom has suffered 
total overthrow; the greatest intellect and 
the greatest folly have been known to 
meet; and the universalist who handles 
everything and embraces nothing, has 
been seen to pass into a pursuer of the 
mere vanities and frivolities of intellectual 
display. 

If, however, a man of genius be fortunately 
free from ambition, there is yet another enemy 
which will commonly lie in wait for his wis- 
dom ; to wit, a great capacity of enjoyment. 
This generally accompanies genius, and is, 
perhaps, the greatest of all trials to the 






OF WISDOM. 107 

moral and spiritual heart. It was a trial 
too severe even for Solomon, 

" whose heart, though large, 
Beguiled by fair Idolatresses fell 
To idols foul." * 

The temptation by which such a man is 
assailed consists in imagining that he has 
within himself and by virtue of his tempera- 
ment, sources of joy altogether independent 
of conduct and circumstances. It is true 
that he has these sources on this uncon- 
ditional tenure for a time; and it is owing 
to this very truth that his futurity is in 
danger, — not in respect of wisdom only, but 
also in respect of happiness. And if we look 
to recorded examples, we shall find that a 
great capacity of enjoyment does ordinarily 
bring about the destruction of enjoyment 
in its own ulterior consequences, having 
uprooted wisdom by the way. 

A man of genius, so gifted — or, let us rather 
say, so tempted — lives until the consumma- 
tion approaches, as if he possessed some elixir 

* Paradise Lost. 



108 OF WISDOM. 

or phylactery, reckless of consequences, be- 
cause his happiness, being so inward to his 
nature, seems to be inherent and indefeasible. 
Wisdom is not wanted. The intellect, per- 
haps, amidst the abundance of its joys, re- 
joices in wise contemplations; but wisdom is 
not adopted and domesticated in the mind, 
owing to the fearlessness of the heart. For 
wisdom will have no hold on the heart in 
which joy is not tempered by fear. The fear 
of the Lord, we know, is the beginning of it ; 
and some hallowing and chastening influences 
of fear will always go along with it. Fear, 
indeed, is the mother of foresight ; spiritual 
fear, of a foresight that reaches beyond the 
grave ; temporal fear, of a foresight that falls 
short ; but without fear there is neither the 
one foresight nor the other ; and as pain has 
been truly said to be the deepest thing in our 
nature, so is it fear that will bring the depths 
of our nature within our knowledge : — 

" What sees rejoicing genius in the Earth ? 
A thousand meadows with a thousand herds 
Freshly luxuriant in a Mayday dawn ; 
A thousand ships that caracole and prance 



OF WISDOM. 109 

With freights of gold upon a sunny sea ; 

A thousand gardens gladdened by all flowers, 

That on the air breathe out an odorous beauty."" 

Genius may see all this and rejoice; but it 
will not exalt itself into wisdom, unless it 
see also the meadow in the livid hues of 
winter, the ship under bare poles, and the 
flower when the beauty of the fashion of it 
perishes. 

It is true, however, that the cases are rare 
and exceptional in which this dangerous 
capacity of enjoyment is an unbroken habit, 
so as to bring a steady and continuous pres- 
sure upon the moral mind. A great capacity 
of suffering belongs to genius also ; and it has 
been observed that an alternation of joyful- 
ness and dejection is quite as characteristic 
of the man of genius as intensity in either 
kind. Doubtless these alternations will 
greatly enlarge his knowledge both of Man 
and of the universe. The many moods of his 
own mind will give him a penetrating and 
experienced insight into many minds ; and 
he will contemplate the universe and all that 



110 OF WISDOM. 

goes on in it from many points of view. 
Moreover, it is by re-action from the extreme 
of one state, that the mind receives the most 
powerful impulse towards another— in re- 
silience that it has its plenary force. But 
though these alternations of excess do thus 
enlarge and enrich the understanding and 
minister to wisdom so far forth, they must 
yet, by the shocks which they occasion to the 
moral will, do injury on the whole to that 
composite edifice, built up of the moral and 
rational mind, in which Wisdom has her 
dwelling. The injury is not so great as in 
the other case : better are winter and sum- 
mer for the mind than the torrid zone — 
feasts and fasts than a perpetual plenty — 
but either way the temperament of genius is 
hardly ever favourable to wisdom; that is, 
the highest order of genius, or that which 
includes wisdom, is of all things the most 
rare. 

On the other hand, wisdom without genius 
(a far more precious gift than genius with- 
out wisdom) is, by God's blessing upon the 



OF WISDOM. Ill 

humble and loving heart, though not as often 
met with as " the ordinary of Nature's sale- 
work," yet not altogether rare ; for the 
desire to be right will go a great way towards 
wisdom. Intellectual guidance is the less 
needed where there is little to lead astray 
— where humility lets the heart loose to 
the impulses of love. That we can be wise 
by impulse will seem a paradox to some ; 
but it is a part of that true doctrine which 
traces wisdom to the moral as well as the 
intellectual mind, and more surely to the 
former than to the latter — one of those 
truths which is recognised when we look 
into our nature through the clearness of a 
poetic spirit : — 

" Moments there are in life — alas, how few ! — 
When casting cold prudential doubts aside, 
We take a generous impulse for our guide, 

And following promptly what the heart thinks best, 
Commit to Providence the rest ; 

Sure that no after-reckoning will arise 

Of shame or sorrow, for the heart is wise. 
And happy they who thus in faith obey 

Their better nature : err sometimes they may, 
And some sad thoughts lie heavy in the breast, 



112 OF WISDOM. 

Such as by hope deceived are left behind ; 
But like a shadow these will pass away 
From the pure sunshine of the peaceful mind."* 

The doctrine of wisdom by impulse is no 
doubt liable to be much misused and misap- 
plied. The right to rest upon such a creed 
accrues only to those who have so trained 
their nature as to be entitled to trust it. It 
is the impulse of the habitual heart which 
the judgment may fairly follow upon occa- 
sion — of the heart which, being habitually 
humble and loving, has been framed by love 
to wisdom. Some such fashioning love will 
always effect ; for love cannot exist without 
solicitude, solicitude brings thoughtfulness, 
and it is in a thoughtful love that the wis- 
dom of the heart consists. The impulse of 
such a heart will take its shape and guidance 
from the very mould in which it is cast, 
without any application of the reason express; 
and the most inadvertent motion of a wise 
heart will for the most part be wisely di- 
rected ; providentially, let us rather say ; for 

* Southey's Oliver Newman. 



OF WISDOM. 113 

Providence has no more eminent seat than 
in the wisdom of the heart. 

Wisdom by impulse, then, is to be trusted 
in by those only who have habitually used 
their reason to the full extent of its powers 
in forming the heart and cultivating the 
judgment, whilst, owing to its constitu- 
tional deficiency, or to its peculiarity (for 
the reason may be unserviceable from other 
causes than deficiency), they are conscious 
that their judgment is likely to be rather 
perplexed than cleared by much think- 
ing on questions on which they are called 
upon to act or decide. Those in whom the 
meditative faculty is peculiarly strong, will 
often find themselves in this predicament ; 
witness Christopher Hervie's complaint : — 

" One while I think ; and then I am in pain 
To think how to unthink that thought again." * 

And they whose deliberative judgment is 
weak and indecisive from a natural debility 
of the reason, may act from impulse, and even 
though the consequences be evil, may be held 



* The Synagogue, 41. 



114 OF WISDOM. 

to be wise according to their kind. For the 
course they took may have been the wisest 
for tliem, being founded upon a just measure- 
ment of the insufficiencies of their under- 
standing. And those who can take this just 
measurement, and holding their opinions 
with due diffidence, yet act in love and faith 
and without fear, may be wise of heart, 
though erring in judgment ; and though not 
gifted with intellectual wisdom, may yet be 
deemed to have as much understanding as 
innocence has occasion for. 

Upon this, however, the question will arise, 
whether errors of the judgment are, as such, 
absolutely void of offence ; and whether he 
who has committed them may look back 
upon them, whatever may have been their 
consequences, without any compunctious 
visitings. An eminent statesman is said to 
have averred, that when he was conscious of 
having taken a decision with all due care 
and consideration, to the best of his judg- 
ment and with the best intentions, he never 
looked back to it with a moment's regret, 



OF WISDOM. 115 

though the result might prove it to have been 
wholly erroneous. This is a frame of mind 
highly conducive to civil courage, and there- 
fore not without its advantages in political 
life. But it is not equally conducive to wis- 
dom. Nor, perhaps, in this unqualified form, 
is it to be altogether vindicated in morals. 
At all events, so much regret might be felt, 
if no more, as would suffice to awaken some 
self-questionings, not merely as to the spe- 
cific moral rectitude accompanying or proxi- 
mately preceding the particular act, but as 
to that general and life-long training of the 
heart to wisdom, which gives the best assur- 
ance of specific results, and of which, there- 
fore, specific failures should suggest the 
deficiency. Some short-comings of this kind 
there must of course be in all human beings, 
and they should be at all times aware of it ; 
but it is in the order of Nature that this con- 
sciousness should be quickened from time to 
time by the contemplation of evil conse- 
quences arising from specific errors of judg- 
ment, however innocent in themselves ; which 



116 OF WISDOM. 

contemplation, accompanied with a natural 
regret, constitutes what may be called a 
repentance of the understanding — not easily 
to be escaped by a plain man, nor properly 
to be repudiated by a philosopher. 

Yet when the consequences of an error of 
judgment are irremediable, how often are 
those who would animadvert upon it, met 
with the admonition to "let the past be 
past :" as if the past had no relations with 
the future ; and as if the experience of our 
errors of judgment, and the inquisition into 
their sources, did not, by its very painfulness, 
effect the deepest cultivation of the under- 
standing, — that cultivation whereby what 
is irremediable is itself converted into a 
remedy. 

The main scope and design of this disqui- 
sition having been to inculcate that wisdom 
is still more essentially a moral and spiritual 
than it is an intellectual attribute, that genius 
can mount to wisdom only by Jacob's ladder, 
and that knowledge can only be converted 
into wisdom by an application of the heart, — 



OF WISDOM. 117 

I cannot better close it than with that decla- 
ration of the nature of wisdom which is deli- 
vered in the 28th chapter of the book of Job :— 

" Whence then cometh wisdom ? and where 
is the place of understanding ? 

"Seeing it is hid from the eyes of all 
Hying, and kept close from the fowls of the air. 

" Destruction and death say, we have heard 
the fame thereof with our ears. 

" God understandeth the way thereof, and 
he knoweth the place thereof. 

" For he looketh to the ends of the earth, 
and seeth under the whole Heaven ; 

" To make the weight for the winds ; and 
he weigheth the waters by measure. 

" When he made a decree for the rain, and 
a way for the lightning of the thunder : 

"Then did he see it, and declare it; he 
prepared it, yea, and searched it out. 

" And unto man he said, Behold, the fear of 
the Lord, that is wisdom ; and to depart from 
evil is understanding." 



CHILDREN. 

From the complaints which everybody 
brings against everybody in the matter of the 
management of children, one might be led to 
suppose that such a thing as good manage- 
ment of them did not exist amongst man- 
kind. And no doubt this is so far true, that 
on a subject on which so many and such 
various kinds of errors may be committed, 
the best management can be but very imper- 
fect, and those who are complained of should 
be willing to listen, in the assurance that real 
errors there are, and for the chance of those 
being the errors that are hit upon and 
pointed out. 

But remonstrance and admonition, whether 
listened to or not, seem in general to be of as 
little avail on these questions as theories and 



CHILDREN. 119 

doctrines; and from the uselessness of all 
these, and from the fact that thoughtful and 
cultivated people are seen, not unfrequently, 
to get as wrong as others, it may be inferred 
that the most essential qualifications for 
training a child well, are not of a nature to 
be communicated by books or lectures on 
education. They are, 1st, The desire to be 
right in the matter ; 2nd, Sense ; 3rd, Kind- 
ness ; and 4th, Firmness. 

Where these are wanting, the wisest admo- 
nitions in the world will be of no other use 
than to relieve the mind of the person who 
throws them away. 

Theories, however, seem to have more 
power to pervert the natural understanding, 
in this case, than they have to enlighten it. 
The doctrine of an eminent writer (of a gene- 
ration now nearly gone), that a child should 
be reasoned into obedience, had, in its day, 
more of a misleading efficacy than might 
have been thought possible ; and many a 
parent was induced to believe that a child 
should be taught to give its obedience, not 



120 CHILDREN. 

because it was obedience, but because the 
thing ordered was reasonable ; the little 
casuists and controversialists being expected 
to see the reason of things as readily in real 
life, as in the dialogues between Tutor and 
Charles. The common sense of mankind 
has now made an end of this doctrine, and it 
is known now, as it was before the transit 
of that eminent person, that obedience — 
prompt, implicit, unreasoning, and almost 
unconscious — is the first thing to be taught 
to a child, and that he can have no peace for 
his soul without it. 

The notion of setting up the reason to be 
the pivot of humanity from the cradle for- 
wards, belongs to a generation of fallacies 
which have returned to the dust from 
which they came ; but it included one error 
in theories of education which will be found 
to belong to many that are still extant : the 
error of assuming that the parent is to be 
perfect. Under the reasoning regimen, what 
was to happen when the parent's reasons 
were bad ? And in like manner, with respect 



CHILDREN. 121 

to many less unnatural systems which are 
recommended as if they were of universal 
applicability, the question may be asked, 
Will most parents be competent to give effect 
to them ? And, bearing in mind the not in- 
considerable number of mankind who labour 
under imperfections of the understanding or 
other disqualifying defects, I believe we shall 
find that a few strong instincts and a few 
plain rules, are all that can be appealed to 
for general guidance in the management of 
children. 

That first and foremost rule of exacting 
obedience, is so far from being subject to the 
condition of showing reasons, that I believe 
a parent with a strong will, although it be a 
perverse one, will train a child better than a 
parent of a reasonable mind, tainted by infir- 
mity of purpose. For as " obedience is better 
than sacrifice, and to hearken than the fat of 
rams," so an authority which is absolute by 
virtue of its own inherent strength, is better 
than one which is shaken by a reference to 
ends and purposes, and by reasonable doubts 



122 CHILDKEN. 

as to whether they are the best and most 
useful. Nor will the parent's perversity, 
unless it be unkind or ill-tempered, occasion 
the child half so much uneasiness in the one 
case, as the child will suffer from those per- 
versities of its own which will spring up in 
the other ? For habits of instant and mecha- 
nical obedience are those that give rest to the 
child, and spare its health and temper ; whilst 
a recusant or dawdling obedience will keep it 
distracted in propensity, bringing a perpetual 
pressure on its nerves and consequently on 
its mental and bodily strength. 

To enforce this kind of obedience our most 
efficacious instrument is a clear and deter- 
minate manner; because with children at 
least this is the most significant expression of 
an authoritative will. But it is an instru- 
ment which those only can employ who 
are authoritative by temperament; for an 
assumed manner, or one which is not true to 
the temperament, will be of no avail. Those 
parents who are not gifted with this temper- 
ament and this manner, must needs, if they 



CHILDREN. 123 

do their duty, have recourse to punishments ; 
of which, in the case of most children, those 
are best which are sharp and soon over. 
And let not the parents think that by a just 
and necessary amount of punishment they 
run any risk of impairing the child's affec- 
tions. The risk is far greater of impairing 
them by indulgence. A spoilt child never 
loves its mother; never at least with the 
same measure of love as if it were unspoilt. 
And there is in human nature an essential 
though somewhat mysterious connection of 
love with fear, which, though chiefly recog- 
nised in the relations between man and God, 
is also discernible in the relations between 
man and man, and especially in those between 
parent and child. Love in either relation is 
deepened by some degree — not oppressive or 
too disturbing — some slight degree of fear ; 
and the very truth of the text, that " perfect 
love casteth out fear," shows that fear must 
be there before the love is made perfect. 
Therefore the parent who shrinks from in- 
flicting just and proper punishments upon a 
G 2 



124 CHILDREN. 

child, deprives that child not only of the 
rest to be found in duty and obedience, but 
also of the blessings of a deeper love. 

There is another way not much adverted 
to by blind parents, in which children are 
injured by undue indulgence. It prevents 
them from benefiting by the general tendency 
of mankind 'to have kind and friendly feelings 
towards children. Such feelings are checked 
and abated when it is seen that children are 
unduly favoured by their parents. And when 
the rights and comforts of others are sacri- 
ficed for their sake, instead of being objects 
for the protection and good offices of all 
around them, they become odious in the same 
manner as princes' favourites do, and their 
parents' sins are visited upon them. 

Then the repugnance which people feel 
towards the objects of an unjust partiality, 
provokes them to exaggerate the demerits of 
the children,— -not probably to the face of the 
parents, but in a way to go round to them, — 
whereupon the parents come in with some 
show of reason as protectors of injured inno- 



CHILDREN. 125 

cence, and fortify themselves in their own 
delusions by detecting injustice in the views 
of others. It is not the nature of mankind to 
be unjust to children, and where parents find 
this injustice to prevail, they should look 
for the source of it in their children or in 
themselves. 

Indeed, it is the nature of mankind to be 
only too kind to children, and to take too 
much notice of them ; and this is a reason 
for not throwing them too much in the way 
of strangers and casual visitors. When the 
visitors are intelligent, and the parents are 
not the sort of people to whom flattery is 
acceptable, the children may be no worse for 
meeting the visitors, though they should 
never be sent for to be shown. But when the 
parents are known to have open ears for the 
praises of their children, there are hardly 
any strangers so careful and conscientious 
as not to say what is expected of them, and 
very many will carry their blandishments to 
an extreme of grossness and falseness. A 
considerate visitor will observe the conduct 



126 CHILDEEN. 

of a judicious parent towards a child, and be 
guided by it ; but the instances are far more 
frequent in which the folly of injudicious 
parents is unscrupulously abetted by the 
levity of others ; and the only consolation for 
a rational bystander is that the children may 
have more sense than their flatterers and 
more discernment than their parents, and 
be unflattered and ill-pleased (as will some- 
times happen) by these coarse attempts at 
adulation. 

It is selfishness on the part of parents 
which gives rise to undue indulgence of 
children, — the selfishness of sacrificing those 
for whom they care less to those for whom 
they care more ; and the selfishness of the 
parent for the child will invariably produce 
selfishness of the child for himself. A spoilt 
child is never generous. And selfishness is 
induced in a child not only by too much 
indulgence, but even by too much attention. 
It will be most for a child's happiness and 
well-being, both present and to come, that he 
should feel himself, in respect to comforts 



CHILDREN. 127 

and enjoyments, the most insignificant person 
in the house. In that case he will have his 
own resources, which will be more available 
to him than any which perpetual attention 
can minister; he will be subject to fewer 
discontents ; and his affections will be more 
cultivated by the occasional tokens of kind- 
ness which a contented child will naturally 
receive in sufficient abundance, than they 
would be by continual endeavours to make 
him happy. 

And if continual attention to making him 
happy will not produce happiness, neither 
will continual attention to making him good 
produce goodness. For if the child feels that 
there is some one incessantly occupied with 
his happiness and goodness, he will come to 
be incessantly occupied with himself. Some- 
thing must be left in a spirit of faith and 
hope to Nature and God's providence. Parents 
are the instruments, but they are not to be 
all in all. Room must be left for some 
liberty of action, for many an untended im- 
pulse, for self-reliance, for temptations and 



128 CHILDREN. 

trials, with their natural results of victory 
with self-respect, or defeat with remorse. By 
such treatment the child's moral nature, 
being amply exercised, will be seasonably 
strengthened ; and when he comes into the 
world as a man, he will come with a man's 
weapons of defence ; whereas if the child be 
constantly watched and kept out of harm's 
way, he will come into the world a moral 
weakling. I was once present when an old 
mother, who had brought up a large family of 
children with eminent success, was asked by 
a young one what she would recommend in 
the case of some children who were too 
anxiously educated, and her reply was — " I 
think, my dear, a little wholesome neglect." 

For similar reasons it may be well that 
children should not be hedged in with any 
great number of rules and regulations. Such 
as are necessary to be established, they 
should be required implicitly to observe. 
But there should be none that are super- 
fluous. It is only in rich families, where there 
is a plentiful attendance of governesses and 



CHILDREN. 129 

nurses, that many rules can be enforced; 
and I believe that the constant attentions of 
governesses and nurses is one of the greatest 
moral disadvantages to which the children of 
the rich are exposed. 

I have heard a multiplicity of petty regu- 
lations defended, on the ground that it was a 
constant exercise of the child's sense of right 
and wrong. But will a child be really the 
better for always thinking about whether he 
does right or wrong, that is,- — always thinking 
about himself? Were it not well that, for 
hours together, no question of right or wrong 
should arise in his path? or at least none 
that demands from him more than a half- 
mechanical attention ? For the conscience 
of a child may easily be worn out, both by 
too much pressure and by over-stimulation. 
I have known a child to have a conscience 
of such extraordinary and premature sensi- 
bility, that at seven years of age she would 
be made ill by remorse for a small fault. 
She was brought up by persons of excellent 
understanding, with infinite care and affec- 

G 3 



130 CHILDREN. 

tion, and yet, by the time she was twenty 
years of age, she had next to no conscience 
and a hard heart. A person who had some 
experience of precocious consciences once 
observed to me, in respect to those children 
who are said to be too good and too clever 
to live, that it was very desirable they should 
not. 

These views are not, of course, to be 
pushed too far. A child's conscience should 
always have that sufficiency of exercise 
which due discipline and the occasions of 
life will not fail to supply, without factitious 
duties or needless rules. And with respect 
to the treatment of the conscience on the 
point of sensibility, natural constitutions are 
so diverse that it is difficult to speak gene- 
rally ; but though I would not have it much 
stimulated or unintermittingly worked upon 
— though I would avoid to intimidate or 
intenerate the conscience — I do not agree 
with those who think that the appeals to it 
should be invariably made with a judicial 
calmness, and that all punishments should 



CHILDREN. 131 

be inflicted dispassionately. Moral disap- 
probation on the part of parents towards 
children (as indeed on the part of men 
towards men throughout all relations of life) 
should not operate mechanically, bringing 
with it, like a calculating machine, a propor- 
tionate evil to be suffered as a consequence 
of every evil act. It should operate accord- 
ing to its own human nature, as a matter of 
emotion, not only bringing an evil to be 
suffered, but a moral sentiment to be recog- 
nised and taken to heart — a passion which 
should strike upon the moral sense. 

According to the nature of the child and 
of the fault, the emotion should be some- 
times more of sorrow than of anger, some- 
times more of anger than of sorrow. But it 
were better for the child's conscience that 
there should be some errors of emotion, than 
that punishments should be cold and diy. 
A parent should " be angry and sin not ; " 
that is, the anger should be a just and moral 
anger, and grave and governed ; but at the 
same time it should be the real anger of 



132 CHILDREN. 

flesh and blood, and not the mere vis motrix 
of an instrument of discipline. In this way 
the moral sentiments of the parent, if they 
be virtuous, generous and just, will be im- 
parted to the child : for it is a truth never to 
be lost sight of in the treatment of our 
children, that their characters are formed, 
not by what we do, think, or teach, but by 
what we feel and by what we are. 

With respect to the intellectual cultivation 
of children, it is very important that the 
body, mind, and moral sense of the child 
should proceed in their growth proportion- 
ately and pari passu : — 

" Por nature, crescent, does not grow alone 
In thews and bulk ; but as this temple waxes, 
The inward service of the mind and soul 
Grows wide withal." * 

As this temple waxes let it be ; not before 
this temple waxes. Whichsoever of these 
constituents of the human being, the body, 
the intellect and the moral sense, shall 
shoot forth prematurely and in advance of 



Hamlet. 



CHILDREN. 133 

the others, will run a great risk of being- 
nipped and blighted. The intellectual is, of 
the three — in these times at least — that 
which is most liable to premature develop- 
ment. The evil consequences of such deve- 
lopment have been very generally perceived, 
and many maxims are afloat against over- 
education; but the ambition of parents is 
commonly too strong for their wisdom and 
prudence, and the over-education proceeds, 
the maxims notwithstanding. And schools 
and colleges and all tutors and teachers 
being governed by the same spirit, it is diffi- 
cult for a wise parent to give effect to wise 
views, even when he heartily desires it. One 
rule, however, it is in his own hands to 
carry out, and this is, if he talk much to his 
children, not to talk intellectually. The in- 
tellectual talk of adults is apt, not only to sti- 
mulate the child's intellect to efforts beyond 
its strength, but also to overlay many intellec- 
tual tastes which have their natural place 
in childhood and which it is good for every 
mind to have passed through. It is best for 



134 CHILDREN. 

a child that he should admire cordially what 
he does admire ; but if the intellectual tastes 
and criticisms of the adult mind are brought 
to bear upon him, he will try to admire 
what he cannot and fail to admire what he 
might. 

On the other hand, I would not be under- 
stood to recommend the sort of jocular non- 
sense which some intellectual parents will 
have recourse to in order to place their con- 
versation on a level with a child's under- 
standing ; nor do I observe that children are 
fond of it, or at all flattered by it, but rather 
the contrary. For it is a mistake to suppose 
that any joke is good enough for a child. 
Intelligent children, if not absolutely fasti- 
dious as to jokes, (which certainly all children 
are as to taste and manners), will not, how- 
ever, accept as complacently as might be 
wished, the mere good-natured disposition to 
make them merry ; nor can they respond in 
the manner that is sometimes expected from 
them, to every well-meant effort of heavy 
gambolling and forced facetiousness. What- 



CHILDREN. 135 

ever is most simple and natural is most 
pleasing to a child ; and if the parent be not 
naturally light and gay, he had better be 
grave with his children, only avoiding to be 
deep or subtle in discourse. 

But however parents may demean them- 
selves, it is not desirable that they and their 
children should be always together. Child- 
ren and young people — and I should say 
even adults — are not the better in their un- 
derstandings for an exclusive association 
with their superiors in understanding. Such 
association should be occasional, not constant. 
The inferior mind so associated may possibly 
not be of a nature to be over-excited and 
over-wrought; it may be safe from those 
evils through defect of spontaneous force 
and activity; but in that case another evil 
arises ; it is led to adopt its opinions instead 
of thinking them, and finds a short cut to 
posts to which it would be better that it 
should fight its way. In the case of a young 
man who has been brought up in the con- 
stant society of a parent greatly superior to 



136 CHILDREN. 

himself, it will generally be found that he 
has come by his opinions, not (as is best in 
youth) partly through deference to authority, 
partly through conflict with equals, and 
partly by spontaneous impulse, but almost 
entirely by adoption, as if they were certified 
facts. And this leaves the mind unenlarged 
and the judgment unexercised. 

There is a class of opinions, however, — 
those connected with the moral and spiritual 
nature, — which are to be inculcated on a 
different principle from those which concern 
merely the cultivation of the intellect. For 
these are opinions which are not to be valued 
merely as opinions, but on account of the 
feelings and affections which are to be incor- 
porated with them. Great as is the import- 
ance of true religious doctrine — which is, as 
it were, the body of religion — it is, neverthe- 
less, an importance subsidiary and derivative ; 
it is derived from the efficacy of true religious 
doctrine to cherish and protect the growth of 
genuine religious feeling, which is the soul of 
religion. The opinions are the organic struc- 



CHILDREN. 137 

ture ; the feelings are the vital principle. It 
is for the sake of the feelings that the organi- 
sation is so important; and I think, there- 
fore, that religious truths, or what the parent 
believes to be religious truths, should be pre- 
sented to children through the conveyance of 
the feelings for implicit adoption, and not as 
matters to be wrought out in the under- 
standing. For the primary object, which is to 
fix the feeling, will be in some measure frus- 
trated — the feeling will be in some measure 
abated or supplanted — if more thought be 
called up than the feeling of its own mere 
motion will naturally generate. 

But if the religious beliefs of a child be not 
founded in his reason, what, it may be asked, 
will become of them when the credulous sim- 
plicity of childhood shall be at an end, and 
the thinking faculty shall have set itself to 
work? I answer that whether his beliefs 
have been founded in reason, or whether 
they have been founded in love, receiving 
from reason merely a collateral support, it 
is probable that if the child be of an active 



138 CHILDREN. 

and inquisitive understanding, the beliefs will, 
at one period or another within childhood or 
succeeding it, sustain some shock and trial. 
But those who have taken much note of 
human nature will have observed, I think, 
that the reason is the weakest part of it, 
(God forbid that it should not !) and that the 
most reasonable opinions are seldom held 
with much tenacity unless when they have 
been adopted in the same way as that in 
which prejudices are adopted ; that is when 
they have been borne in upon the under- 
standing by the feelings. Whilst I think, 
therefore, that love is that constituent of 
faith of which a child's nature is most capa- 
ble, I also believe it to be that groundwork of 
faith on which all nature must rest, if it 
have any resting-place at all ; and love, there- 
fore, inspiring the reason, but not reduced to 
the reason, must be so imparted to the child 
as to animate the growing and changing 
forms of doctrine throughout the several 
stages of childhood ; and when childhood 
shall have been left behind, it is this, and 



CHILDREN. 139 

nothing else, that can be relied upon to with- 
stand the rashness of a youthful intellect, 
flushed by its first discoveries. The struggle 
will be great at this season in proportion to 
the largeness of the nature and the force of 
the elements at work ; and if a strong under- 
standing should be too suddenly expanded, it 
is probable that there will be some disruption 
of the material fabric of doctrine in which 
the spiritual feeling has hitherto had its 
abode. But if the principle of love have 
been cherished and made strong from the 
first, the broken forms of doctrine will re~ 
unite, and love, with whatever strivings and 
wrestlings, will find an organic faith in which 
to set up its rest and secure itself from 
accidents of the intellect, as well as from 
whatsoever the w T orld can do against it. 
And in most cases (though not in all un- 
happily) the faith will be the more strongly 
founded for the conflict in which it has 
been engaged. It was by Eros and Eris, by 
Love and Strife, that Order was brought out 
of Chaos. 



1 40 CHILDREN. 

" I can just remember/' says a theologian 
of the last century, " when the women first 
taught me to say my prayers, I used to have 
the idea of a venerable old man, of a com- 
posed benign countenance, with his own 
hair, clad in a morning gown of a grave- 
coloured flowered damask, sitting in an elbow 
chair."* And he proceeds to say, that in 
looking back to these beginnings, he is in no 
way disturbed at the grossness of his infant 
theology. The image thus shaped by the 
imagination of the child was in truth merely 
one example of the various forms and con- 
ceptions, fitted to divers states and seasons 
and orders and degrees of the religious mind 
whether infant or adult, which represent 
the several approximations such minds, or 
minds at such seasons, can respectively 
make to the completeness of faith. These 
imperfect ideas should be held to be recon- 
ciled and comprehended in that complete- 
ness, not rejected by it ; and the nearest 
approximation which the greatest of human 

* Lights of Nature and Gospel Blended, ch. iii., s. 1. 



CHILDREN. 141 

minds can accomplish is surely to be regarded 
as much nearer to the imperfection of an 
infantine notion than to the fulness of truth. 
The gown of flowered damask and the elbow 
chair may disappear ; the anthropomorphism 
of childhood may give place to the divine 
incarnation of the Second Person in after 
years ; and we may come to conceive of the 
Deity as Milton did ..when his epithets were 
most abstract : 

" So spake the Sovran Presence." 

But after all, these are but different grades of 
imperfection in the forms of doctrinal faith ; 
and if there be a devouter love on the part of' 
the child for what is pictured in his imagina- 
tion as a venerable old man, than in the 
philosophic poet for the "Sovran Presence," 
the child's faith has more of the efficacy of 
religious truth in it than the poet's and phi- 
losopher's. What we have to take care of in 
the religious training of a child is, that the 
love shall be indestructible and paramount ; 
so that in all the transmutations of doctrine 



142 CHILDREN. 

which after years may bring, from the palpa- 
ble picturings of Tucker's infant imagination 
to the " Three Incomprehensibles " of St. 
Athanasius, he may preserve the same reli- 
gious heart ; and whatever other knowledge 
or supposed knowledge shall supervene, may 
still " know that there is nothing better than 
the fear of the Lord, and that there is nothing 
sweeter than to take heed unto the com- 
mandments of the Lord."* 

* Ecclesiasticus, xxiii. 27. 



THE LIFE POETIC. 



Let it not be too contemplative for action, 
nor too active to afford room and space for 
contemplation. The tendency of our times 
is to bring every man of eminent abilities 
into great outward activity, and thereby 
perhaps in some cases to dam up and 
divert to the turning of this mill or that, 
the stream which should have flowed un- 
broken " in omne vohibilis czvum" and made 
itself a mirror to nature. But it may hap- 
pen to a man of genius, conscious of this 
tendency of the age, to throw himself too 
much into the opposite extreme. His lean- 
ings should be towards retirement, no doubt ; 
but he should indulge them, though largely, 
yet still with a measured freedom, not a 
total abandonment. 



144 THE LIFE POETIC. 

" Fountain heads and pathless groves, 
Places which pale passion loves " * — 

should be, without question, his favourite 
haunts : but he is not to forget that for the 
cultivation of the highest order of poetry, it 
is necessary that he should be conversant 
with life and nature at large, and 

" Know all qualities with a learned spirit 
Of human dealings " f — - 

that his poetry should spring out of his life, 
and that his life should abound in duties 
as well as in contemplations. 

For that poetic vision which is the vision 
of the introverted eye alone, has but a nar- 
row scope : and observation comes of action, 
and most of that action which is the most 
responsible. And if it be true that " a man's 
mind is sometimes wont to tell him more 
than seven watchmen that sit above in an 
high tower," t it is also true that that man 
will hear most of all, who hearkens to his 
own mind and to the seven watchmen 

* Fletcher. t Shakspeare. 

J Ecclesiasticus, xxxvii. 14. 



THE LIFE POETIC. 145 

besides; whilst what he hears will turn to 
knowledge, and will he fixed, amplified, and 
defined, in proportion as there are deeds and 
consequences to follow, and sweet or bitter 
fruits. He is but a child in knowledge, how- 
ever versed in meditation, who has not to 
act, to suffer, and to teach, as well as to 
inquire and to learn. If a meditative man 
be used to be taken about a city in a car- 
riage or led about it by a friend, it will be 
long before he knows his way in it ; but not 
so if he have to go about in it by himself, still 
less if he have to lead another. 

If, then, a poet would entitle himself to take 
the highest rank in his art, — to be numbered, 
that is, amongst the " poets sage," he should 
be, to a moderate extent, mixed up with the 
affairs of life. His mind should be not a 
vessel only, but a vat. His wisdom should 
be a tried and stirring wisdom. His specula- 
tions should emanate from facts and events, 
and his poetry should have its roots in the 
common earth. 

But it is difficult to say how this convers- 



146 THE LIFE POETIC. 

ancy with men arid affairs is to be attempted 
in these times, without losing hold of the 
contemplative life altogether, and becoming 
involved in the inordinate activities of the 
age. If a profession be adopted, there is 
hardly any which leaves a moderate degree 
of leisure except to men of inferior abilities. 
Men of eminent abilities embarked in a pro- 
fession, are placed under obligations of 
exertion which they cannot escape. In 
trade, strenuous efforts are enforced upon 
a man by the pressure of competition ; and 
trading occupations are perhaps in other 
respects unsuited to a poet. Political life 
is not open to him unless circumstances 
be favourable; and to a man who is alert 
and excitable (as a poet must be supposed 
to be,) it will prove too violent a diver- 
sion from poetic pursuits ; and this, not from 
the nature of the business only, but because 
it commonly leads a man of quick sym- 
pathies (which again must be supposed in 
the poet's case), into a good deal of social 
dissipation. 



THE LIFE POETIC. 147 

" If life," says Cowley, 

" If life should a well-ordered poem be, 
(In which he only hits the white 
Who joins true profit with the best delight,) 
The more heroic strain let others take, 
Mine the Pindaric way I '11 make, 
The matter shall be grave, the numbers loose and free." 

This liberty of life cannot, I think, in these 
days — and in the case of a man of eminent 
abilities — be secured, if a man be confined 
to any of the established ruts in which life is 
made to run. 

If, then, neither professional, commercial, 
nor political life will sort well with the life 
poetic, there remains little besides casual 
employments and the duties which accrue in 
every station, to supply a poet with the 
quota of action required for his purposes. 
These, however, may suffice if they be sedu- 
lously pursued. The poor are always with 
us, and their affairs fall fitly into the hands 
of educated men who have no professional 
avocations. Let the poet be a man of for- 
tune and the duties of a landlord are incum- 
bent upon him, whilst those of a magistrate 
h 2 



148 THE LIFE POETIC. 

lie before him, with the whole field of county 
business. If he be not a proprietor, yet one 
place he must occupy — that of a parishioner, 
with parochial functions ; and the vestry 
will present, to an observant eye, as instruc- 
tive an exponent of human nature, with 
pretty nearly the same variety of features, as 
the Lords spiritual and temporal with Her 
Majesty's faithful Commons in Parliament 
assembled. Nor is the business of a parish 
to be regarded as unworthy the diligent at- 
tention of a man of genius. It is not impos- 
sible that, from time to time, it may require 
the same species of ability as the business of 
an empire, and exercise the same faculties in 
its adjustment ; for the amount of prudence 
and sagacity needful for the successful trans- 
action of business depends comparatively 
little on the scale of operation. Sometimes, 
indeed, the larger the scale the easier the 
task. 

Furthermore, a man of judgment and 
ability will find, as he advances in life, that 
the duties of friendship and relationship will 



THE LIFE POETIC. 149 

multiply upon him more than upon men of 
inferior capacity, if only he be found willing 
to discharge them. And if he shall attain to 
eminence as a poet, that, like every other 
species of eminence, will bring with it no in- 
considerable demands upon his activity. To 
these may be added — if they should fall in 
his way — casual and temporary employments 
in the public service, taking care, however, 
not to let that service fix itself upon him and 
suck the blood out of his poetic veins. Milton 
had employments of this nature ; and before 
he should hold himself equipped for his great 
enterprise in poetry, he deemed it indispen- 
sable that to " industrious and select reading " 
should be added " steady observation " and 
"insight into all seemly and generous arts 
and affairs." * Spenser and Cowley had such 
employments also ; and many others might 
be named, were they worthy to be named 
after these. 

But if a poet shall fail to find any field for 
external activity which would admit also of 

* Reason of Church Government, Book 2nd. 



150 THE LIFE POETIC. 

leisure and retirement, or if he shall have an 
invincible repugnance to an outward life, 
(which may not unnaturally be his predica- 
ment), then it behoves him the more to place 
his life under a well-devised discipline, in 
order that it may be, if not externally active, 
yet orderly and sedulous. For by how much 
a man shall reserve himself to a contem- 
plative life, by so much will he need a more 
constant and watchful self-regulation in the 
conduct of it ; and by so much, also, will the 
task of self-regulation be difficult and severe. 
The regimen of external circumstance and of 
obligations contracted to others, is an aid 
which only a strong man can dispense with 
in the ordering of his days and hours; and 
moreover, if the course of the hours is to be 
governed wholly from within and pro re natd 
as it were, there will be some danger of self- 
government being accompanied by too much 
of self-occupation. 

Nor is it to be forgotten that the man who 
lies under no external obligation (none that 
is apparent and palpable) to occupy himself 



THE LIFE POETIC. 151 

in one way or another, will become a prey to 
many demands for small services, attentions 
and civilities, such as will neither exercise 
his faculties, add to his knowledge, nor leave 
him to his thoughts. The prosecution of a 
contemplative life is not an answer to any of 
these demands ; for though the man who is 
in the pursuit of an active calling is not 
expected to give up his guineas for the sake 
of affording some trifling gratification to some 
friend or acquaintance or stranger, yet the 
man who has renounced the active calling 
and the guineas in order that he may possess 
his soul in peace, is constantly expected to 
give up his meditations, and no one counts 
it for a sacrifice. Meditation, it is thought, 
can always be done some other day. A man 
without something indispensable to do, will 
find his life to be involved in 'some of the 
difficulties by which a woman's life is often 
beset, one of which difficulties is the want of 
a claim paramount upon her time. And 
these difficulties will not be the less if the 
poet have, as he ought to have, something 



152 THE LIFE POETIC. 

of the woman in his nature; as he ought 
to have, I aver ; because the poet should be 
hie et hcee homo — the representative of human 
nature at large and not of one sex only. With 
the difficulties of a woman's life, the poet will 
not find that any of its corresponding faci- 
lities accrue ; he will find claims to be made 
upon him as upon a man, and no indemnities 
granted to him as a poet. Thus it is that in 
the bustling crowds of this present world, a 
meditative man finds himself, however pas- 
sively disposed, in a position of oppugnancy 
to those around him, and must struggle in 
order to stand still. 

But even if a poet devoted wholly to re- 
tirement, should be able to seclude himself 
from petty and unprofitable interruptions, 
he would still be the better for methodising 
his life by some severity of self-restraint. 
Meditation is a wild business when there is 
nothing else to be done. An excitable mind 
will wander and waste itself if it be unen- 
closed ; and nothing needs to be intermitted 
more than the exercise of the imaginative 



THE LIFE POETIC. 153 

faculties. I have heard a man of ardent 
religious feelings declare that his devotions 
were more lively and spiritual after a day of 
business than in a day consecrated to devo- 
tional exercises ; and in like manner it may 
happen with a poet that there shall be more 
freshness and vigour in the contemplations 
which spring up after compression than in 
those which are the predetermined occupation 
of the day. 

Next to conversancy with life and affairs, 
a poet should cultivate a conversancy with 
external nature. The cultivation, indeed, 
will come of itself, if his life be led where 
nature is favourably presented to him ; and 
not where it is soiled and obscured, as in the 
smoky parts of Yorkshire and Lancashire, or 
built out, as in great cities. If, however, 
circumstances should oblige him to live in a 
city, occasional visits to the country may still 
do much for him — in some cases, perhaps, 
even as much as constant residence. The 
loss of continual intercourse with Nature is, 
no doubt, a great loss to those who have an 
h 3 



154 THE LIFE POETIC. 

ever-flowing love and a never-failing admi- 
ration of her; which are, indeed, supreme 
amongst poetical gifts: but on the other hand, 
if there be some shortcomings in this kind, 
the benefits of continual residence will bear 
a less proportion to those of occasional inter- 
course. What we see rarely is seen with an 
access of enjoyment which quickens obser- 
vation and brightens recollection ; and if the 
susceptibilities need to be stimulated, the 
stimulation will redound more from what is 
fresh than from what is familiar. 

Mr. Tennyson has described — as he only 
could — a sort of semi-seclusion, which would 
seem to combine all that a poet could w r ant 
to favour his intercourse with Nature and 
with his kind : 

" Not wholly in the busy world, nor quite 
Beyond it, blooms the garden that I love : 
News from the humming city comes to it 
In sound of funeral or of marriage bells ; 
And, sitting muffled in dark leaves, you hear 
The windy clanging of the minster clock ; 
Although between it and the garden lies 
A league of grass, washed by a slow, broad stream, 
That, stirred with languid pulses of the oar, 



THE LIFE POETIC. 155 

Waves all its lazy lilies, and creeps on, 
Barge-laden, to three arches of a bridge, 
Crowned with the minster-towers." * 

It must be acknowledged, however, that 
the greatest English Poets of past times did 
undoubtedly live much in London ; and of 
those, he who excelled most in the treatment 
of external nature composed his best descrip- 
tions from the images retained in his imagi- 
nation when the knowledge of nature was at 
one entrance quite shut out. 

In our own times the greatest poets have 
lived in the country; but indeed they had 
good reasons for doing so, independently of 
intercourse with nature. For the social life 
of cities is much changed from what it was 
two hundred years ago. In London, in the 
present times, an eminent man is beset with 
a multiplicity of social enjoyments and excite- 
ments, the very waste-pipes of genial sensi- 
bility; and the poet's imagination, instead 
of forming a fund to be continually deepened 
and widened by influx from secret sources, is 

* The Gardener's Daughter. 



156 THE LIFE POETIC. 

diffused and spread abroad and speedily dried 
up. Such, at least, is the case with those 
eminent men who are lively in discourse or 
cordial and courteous in demeanour. Others, 
perhaps, invested with an adequate unpopu- 
larity, may be in little danger. " Me, though 
blind," says a poet who seems not to have 
perceived the perils of social popularity till 
they had passed by him, — 

"Me, though blind, 
God's mercy spared, from social snares with ease 
Saved by that gracious gift, inaptitude to please." 

But social repulsiveness has its evils too, 
when fully brought out in a metropolitan life : 
the garb of hedgehog skins, though a coat of 
proof, may be turned outside in, and not 
worn with the equanimity with which that 
sort of garment is said to have been worn by 
the Saint. Whether, therefore, the poet be 
socially unacceptable, or be courted, flattered 
and caressed, but most in the latter case, 
London, in these times, is not the place in 
which his faculties will be most favourably 
developed. 



THE HFE POETIC, 157 

And a due appreciation of the temptations 
to which a poet is exposed by popular admi- 
ration and the courtings and wooings of 
social life, may lead us to juster views than 
are, I think, generally entertained of the ways 
in which genius and art are to be cherished 
by nations and governments. There is much 
complaint made by the admirers of arts and 
literature, that their professors are not suffi- 
ciently advanced and honoured by the State 
and by mankind. In my estimation they are 
honoured more than is good either for them- 
selves or for then- calling. Good for mankind 
it may be to admire whatever is admirable 
in genius or art ; but as to the poet himself, 
a very moderate extent of favourable accept- 
ance in his own times is all that can be 
beneficial to him either as a man or as an 
artist. He is by temperament but too excit- 
able; with him the vita umbratilis is essential 
to repose and self-possession ; and it is from 
repose and self-possession, — 

" Deep self-possession, an intense repose — "* 



Coleridge. 



158 THE LIFE POETIC. 

that all genuine emanations of poetic genius 
proceed. To the poet, solitude itself is an 
excitement, into which none that is adventi- 
tious should intrude : the voices which come 
to him in solitude should not be mixed with 
acclamations from without; and the voices 
which proceed from him should not be con- 
founded by the amiable intrusion of their 
own echoes, apt, when quickly reverberated, 
to be too intently listened for. 

It is true that he must have some more or 
less conscious anticipation of sympathy to 
come ; he must feel that his voice will not be 
as the voice of one crying in the desert, but 
that his just thoughts, his glorious visions, 
his passions, and "the high reason of his 
fancies," will, in their due time of maturity, 
and after so many revolutions of the seasons 
as are needful for the ripening of such results, 
reach the hearts of multitudes, and find an 
echo in the ages that are unborn. But these 
anticipations of what is distant are not of a 
nature to agitate or disturb the mind in its 
self-communion. They serve to animate his 



THE LIFE POETIC. 159 

lighter efforts, and they support him in his 
severer labours and more strenuous studies ; 
but they do not dissipate or distract the mind. 
It is far otherwise in respect to contempora- 
neous and immediate admiration ; and I doubt 
whether any high endeavour of poetic art 
ever has been or ever will be promoted by 
the stimulation of popular applause. 

Still less would poetic art be advanced by 
rewards in the shape of civil honours and 
distinctions; and the proposals which have 
been made for so rewarding it betray, when 
they are examined, the inconsistency of the 
views on which they are founded. It would 
probably be admitted by their authors that 
poetic art should not be accounted in any 
respect inferior to military or political art. 
Yet has any one entertained the notion of 
assigning to the greatest poet of an age, civil 
honours and distinctions tantamount to those 
which are assigned to the greatest soldier or 
politician ? The creation of a Duke of Rydal, 
with an appanage of 10,000/. a year, is 
not the sort of measure which has been 



160 THE LIFE POETIC. 

suggested, and probably there is no one who 
would not acknowledge it to be absurd. Yet 
it could be hardly more absurd than the 
assignment to our greatest poets, of titular 
distinctions, which, being the highest that 
are proposed as a reward of poetic genius, are 
yet amongst the lowest that would be consi- 
dered worthy the acceptance of a meritorious 
general officer or a serviceable county 
member. The truth is, that civil honours 
and titular distinctions are altogether unfit 
for great poets ; who, being but two or three 
in a century, are to be distinguished by the 
rarity of their kind. 

With regard to pensions, were they intended 
merely as honorary rewards, they would be 
open to the same objections. If they were 
supposed to have reference to the dignity of 
the calling, such pensions as are given to 
Lord Chancellors and Ambassadors should 
pitch the scale, rather than such as are given 
to Clerks and Collectors of Customs. But 
they are assigned upon different principles, 
and their sufficiency is to be brought to 



THE LIFE POETIC. 161 

another test. In treating of the life which a 
poet ought to lead, I have left out of the 
account one material question, — whether it 
be such a life as it is likely that he will be 
able to lead. And as there is no reason to 
suppose him one of the few who are born to 
a competency, the renunciation which I have 
recommended of all professional and com- 
mercial pursuits, and also of all public em- 
ployments except such as are casual and 
temporary, may well suggest the inquiry in 
what manner he is to be maintained ? Not, 
certainly, on the profits of poetry ; for unless 
he apply himself merely to please and pam- 
per and not to elevate or instruct, his poetry 
will do little indeed towards procuring him 
a subsistence ; it will probably not even yield 
him such a return as would suffice to support 
a labouring man for one month out of the 
twelve. This has been the case with the 
greatest poets, if not during the whole, at 
least during the greater part of their lives ; 
and even when their poetry has attained to 
what may be called popularity, it is still a 



162 THE LIFE POETIC. 

popularity which extends only to the culti- 
vated, as distinguished from the merely edu- 
cated classes, and does not bring with it any 
very profitable sale. 

If poetry, then, be unavailable, will the poet 
be enabled to subsist by the aid of prose ? This 
will probably be his best resource ; but even 
prose will fail to return a profit, unless it be 
written for the market. Having been almost 
the only resource of one who was at once an 
eminent poet and in general literature the 
most distinguished writer of his age, Mr. 
Southey, his example may be fairly adduced 
as showing what can be made of it under the 
most favourable circumstances. By a small 
pension and the office of laureate (yielding 
together about 200/. per annum), he was ena- 
bled to insure his life, so as to make a 
moderate posthumous provision for his family; 
and it remained for him to support himself 
and them, so long as he should live, by his 
writings. With unrivalled industry, infinite 
stores of knowledge, extraordinary talents, a 
delightful style, and the devotion of about 



THE LIFE POETIC. 163 

one-half of his time to writing what should 
be marketable rather than what he would 
have desired to write, he defrayed the cost of 
that frugal and homely way of life which he 
deemed to be the happiest and the best. So 
far it may be said that all was well ; and cer- 
tainly never was man more contented with a 
humble lot than he. But at sixty years of 
age he had never yet had one year's income 
in advance; and when between sixty and 
seventy his powers of writing failed, had it 
not been for the timely grant of an additional 
pension,* his means of subsistence would 
have failed too. It was owing to this grant 
alone that the last years of a life of such 
literary industry as was the wonder of his 
time, were not harassed by pecuniary diffi- 
culties ; and at his death the melancholy 
spectacle was presented, of enormous prepa- 
rations thrown away, one great labour of his 
life half-finished, and other lofty designs 
which had been cherished in his heart of 



Through the care of Sir R. Peel . 



164 THE LIFE POETIC. 

hearts from youth to age, either merely 
inchoate or altogether unattempted. 

We mourn over the lost books of Tacitus 
and Pliny, and rake in the ruins of Hercu- 
laneum to recover them ; but 3001. a-year — 
had it been given in time — might have 
realized for us works, over the loss of which 
our posterity may perhaps mourn as much 
or more ! 

" Things incomplete, and purposes betrayed, 
Make sadder transits o'er Truth's mystic glass, 
Than noblest objects utterly decayed." * 

If one moiety of Mr. Southey's time f — ap- 
plied to procure, by marketable literature, 
the means of subsistence — is found to leave 
such miserable results as these, it may easily 
be imagined what fortune would attend the 
efforts in marketable prose (always assuming 



* Wordsworth. 

t I will allow myself to note here, whether or not it be to the 
purpose, that the only son of the author of the Book of the 
Church — a most active and exemplary clergyman with a large 
family — is left (unavoidably perhaps, but the well-wishers of 
the Church must surely wish that it could be avoided) to 
struggle with the world, on a hard-working poverty-stricken 
curacy. This he does, however, in a spirit of manly contented- 
ness worthy of his father. 



THE LIFE POETIC. 165 

them, of course, to be good and worthy and 
not the mere suppliance of the literary toy- 
shop) of a man of like poetical gifts, but not 
endowed with the same grace and facility in 
composition, the same unwearied industry 
and almost unexampled productiveness. 

Pensions to poets, then, in such cases — 
and, indeed, pensions to all writers, poetical 
or other, in the higher and graver and there- 
fore less popular and lucrative walks of 
literature — may be deemed, I think, though 
not appropriate as honours or rewards, yet 
desirable as providing a subsistence which 
may not be attainable in other ways 
without great injury to the interests of 
literature. The provision should be suited 
to the retired and homely way of life by 
which the true dignity of a poet will be best 
sustained and in which his genius will have 
its least obstructed development ; but it 
should be a provision calculated — if pru- 
dently managed — to make his life, in its 
pecuniary elements, easy and untroubled. I 
say "if prudently managed," because as to 



166 THE LIFE POETIC. 

the wants of a spendthrift poet or of one who 
is incompetent to the management of his 
affairs, they are wants which it is hard to 
measure and impossible to supply. If the 
pensions now given to men of letters, to scien- 
tific men, and to artists, be of such amount 
as would enable them, living frugally, to give 
all or most of their time, with an easy mind, 
to those arts and pursuits by which they 
may best consult the great and perdurable 
interests committed by Providence to their 
charge, then the amount is sufficient, 
though it be but little ; and the fact which 
is so often brought forward, that it is 
less than the ordinary emoluments of 
trades, professions, or the humbler walks 
of the public service, is not material to the 
case. If the pensions, on the other hand, 
be of less amount than will effect this 
purpose, then I think that the just ground 
on which the grant of such pensions is to be 
rested, — that is, the true interests of men of 
genius themselves, and, through them, the 
interests of literature and art, — require that 



THE LIFE POETIC. 167 

they should be advanced in amount so far 
as may be sufficient for this purpose, and 
no farther. 

It is not only to secure to him the undis- 
turbed possession of his time and the undi- 
verted direction of his endeavours, that it is 
expedient to make some sufficient pecuniary 
provision for a poet : such a provision is impor- 
tant also as a safeguard to his character and 
conduct ; for few indeed are the men whose 
character and conduct are unimpaired by pecu- 
niary difficulties ; and though wise men will 
hardly be involved in such difficulties, let their 
need be what it may, and though none but a 
wise man can be a great poet, yet the wisdom 
of the wisest may be weak in action ; it ma}^ 
be infirm of purpose ; through emotions or 
abstractions it may be accessible to one inroad 
or another ; and though I am far from claim- 
ing any peculiar indulgence for the infirmities 
of men of genius — on the contrary in my 
mind nothing can be more erroneous than to 
extend indulgence to moral aberrations pre- 
cisely in those cases in which, operating to 



168 THE LIFE POETIC. 

the corruption of the greatest gifts, they are 
the most malign and pernicious, — yet, for 
this very reason, whilst refusing them any 
indult or absolution, I would claim for men 
of genius all needful protection — more per- 
haps than ought to be needful — in order 
that no danger that can be avoided may 
attend the great national and universal inte- 
rests involved in their life and character. 
For never let this truth depart from the 
minds of poets or of those who would cherish 
and protect them — that the poet and the man 
are one and indivisible ; that as the life and 
character is, so is the poetry ; that the poetry 
is the fruit of the whole moral, spiritual, 
intellectual and practical being; and how- 
soever in the imperfection of humanity, 
fulfilments may have fallen short of aspira- 
tions and the lives of some illustrious poets 
may have seemed to be at odds with greatness 
and purity, yet in so far as the life has 
faltered in wisdom and virtue, failing thereby 
to be the nurse of high and pure imaginations, 
the poet, we may be sure, has been shorn of 



THE LIFE POETIC. 169 

his beams; and whatsoever splendour may 
remain to him, even though to our otherwise 
bedarkened eyes wandering in a terrestrial 
dimness, it may seem to be consummate and 
the very " offspring of Heaven first-born," yet 
it is a reduced splendour and a merely abor- 
tive offspring as compared with what it might 
have been, and with what it is in the bounty 
of God to create, by the conjunction of the 
like gifts of high reason, ardent imagination, 
efflorescence of fancy and intrepidity of im- 
pulse, with a heart subdued to Him and a 
pure and unspotted life. Out of the heart 
are the issues of life, and out of the life are 
the issues of poetry. 

And the greatest of those poets whose 
lives, though perhaps less blemished in reality 
than evil report would have them to be, are 
certainly not free from reproach, have seen 
and acknowledged all this, and have known 
what they have lost. If the little that has 
come down to us concerning Shakspeare 
includes somewhat against him, we know 
also from himself how it was by himself 



170 THE LIFE POETIC. 

regarded; and what is to the present pur- 
• pose, we know that he imputed the evil 
courses into which he was betrayed to the 
way of life forced upon him by the want of a 
competency : — 

" Oh, for my sake do thou with Fortune chide, 
The guilty goddess of my harmful deeds, 

That did not better for my life provide 

Than public means which public manners breeds. 

Thence comes it that my name receives a brand, 
And almost thence my nature is subdued 

To that it works in, like the dyer's hand." * 

And we know further, that when he had 
attained to a competency (would that it had 
been earlier !) he followed that way of life 
no longer. 

We have now plotted out for the poet a life, 
contemplative but not inactive, orderly, dutiful, 
observant, conversant with human affairs 
and with nature; and though homely and 
retired, yet easy as regards pecuniary circum- 
stances. But some particulars remain to be 
added. As his life of contemplation is to be 
varied by practical activity upon occasion, so 

* lllth Sonnet. 



THE LIFE POETIC. 171 

should his solitude be varied by occasional 
companionship. In youth his companions 
will probably be chosen very much for the 
sake of their intellectual powers and acquire- 
ments ; and whilst we are young we are most 
open to cultivation from such companionship. 
Afterwards, truth and kindness come to be, 
if not all in all, yet at least of all qualities 
the most essential ; and to one who, learning 
from books what books can teach, would 
desire to make more direct inquisition into 
the secrets of human nature, it is far less 
important that companionship should be in- 
tellectual than that it should be confidential 
The poet being himself frank and unreserved, 
(as I think poets for the most part will be 
found to be), should beget frankness aud 
unreserve on the part of his companions, who 
should come to him for advice and sympathy 
in all the emergencies of life. " I have got 
into this or that dilemma or difficulty, what 
am I to do?" "I have fallen in love with 
this or that young lady, what will become of 
me?" "I have been ill-used and betrayed, 
i2 



172 THE LIFE POETIC. 

shall I forgive it, or shall I resent it?" The 
poet's companions, making hasty resort to 
him under such circumstances, the inmost 
thoughts of their hearts disclosed by the 
passion of the time, whilst a friendly or per- 
haps even an impassioned interest is excited 
in the heart of the poet, the result will be a 
living knowledge, and a judgment, by as 
much as it is responsibly and affectionately 
exercised, by so much the more deeply culti- 
vated. This is the companionship which, 
being indeed essential to any one who would 
bring out his better nature and fulfil his 
duties as a man, is eminently essential to 
a poet. 

There is another companionship to be 
considered, — that of books. The reading by 
which Milton proposed to prepare himself to 
write poetry was, as appears by a passage to 
which I have already referred, "select read- 
ing." In these times I think that a poet 
should feed chiefly (not of course exclu- 
sively) on the literature of the seventeenth 
century. The diction and the movement 



THE LIFE POETIC. 173 

of that literature, both in verse and in what 
Dryden calls " that other harmony," are, in 
my apprehension, far more fitted than the 
literature which has followed it, to be used 
for the training of the mind to poetry. 
There was no writing public nor reading 
populace in that age. The age was the 
worse for that, but the written style of the 
age was the better. The writers were few 
and intellectual ; and they addressed them- 
selves to learned, or, at least, to studious 
and diligent readers. The structure of their 
language is in itself an evidence that they 
counted upon another frame of mind and a 
different pace and speed in reading, from 
that which can alone be looked to by the 
writers of these days. Their books were not 
written to be snatched up, run through, 
talked over and forgotten ; and their diction, 
therefore, was not such as lent wings to haste 
and impatience, making everything so clear 
that he who ran or flew might read. Rather 
it was so constructed as to detain the reader 
over what was pregnant and profound, and 



174 THE LIFE POETIC. 

compel him to that brooding and prolific 
posture of the mind, by which, if he had 
wings, they might help him to some more 
genial and profitable employment than that 
of running like an ostrich through a desert. 
And hence those characteristics of diction 
by which these writers are made more 
fit than those who have followed them 
to train the ear and utterance of a poet. 
For if we look at the long-suspended sen- 
tences of those days, with all their convolu- 
tions and intertextures — the many parts 
waiting for the ultimate wholeness — we 
shall perceive that without distinctive move- 
ment and rhythmical significance of a very 
high order, it would be impossible that they 
could be sustained in any sort of clearness. 
One of these writer's sentences is often in 
itself a work of art, having its strophes and 
antistrophes, its winding changes and recalls, 
by which the reader, though conscious of 
plural voices and running divisions of 
thought, is not however permitted to disso- 
ciate them from their mutual concert and 



THE LIFE POETIC. 175 

dependency, but required, on the contrary, to 
give them entrance into his mind, opening it 
wide enough for the purpose, as one com- 
pacted and harmonious fabric. Sentences 
thus elaborately constructed, and complex 
though musical, are not easy to a remiss 
reader, but they are clear and delightful to 
an intent reader. Sentences, on the other 
hand, such as are demanded in these times 
by the reading commonalty, and written by 
those who aspire to be their representatives 
in the republic of letters, he under little 
obligation to address themselves to the ear 
of the mind. Sense is to be taken in by so 
little at a time, that it matters not greatly 
what sound goes with it ; or, at all events, 
one movement and one tune, which all the 
world understands, is as much as our sen- 
tence can make room for or our reader will 
take time for ; and as matter and style will 
ever re-act upon each other, I fear there is a 
tendency in our popular writers to stop 
short of that sort of matter to which brief 
bright sentences are not appropriate and 



176 THE LIFE POETIC. 

all-sufficient. However this be, the finer 
melodies of language will always be found 
in those compositions which deal with many 
considerations at once — some principal, some 
subordinate, some exceptional, some grada- 
tional, some oppugnant ; and deal with them 
compositely, by blending whilst they distin- 
guish. And so much am I persuaded of the 
connection between true intellectual harmony 
of language and this kind of composition, 
that I would rather seek for it in an Act of 
Parliament — if any arduous matter of legis- 
lation be in hand — than in the productions 
of our popular writers, however lively and 
forcible. An Act of Parliament, in such 
subject-matter, is studiously written and 
expects to be diligently read, and it generally 
comprises compositions of the multiplex 
character which has been described. It is a 
kind of writing, therefore, to which some 
species of rhythmical movement is indispen- 
sable, as any one will find who attempts to 
draft a difficult and comprehensive enact- 
ment, with the omission of all the words 



THE LIFE "POETIC. 177 

which speak to the ear only and are super- 
fluous to the sense. 

Let me not be misunderstood as presuming 
to find fault generally and indiscriminately 
with our modern manner* of writing. It 
may be adapted to its age and its purposes ; 
which purposes, as bearing directly upon 
living multitudes, have a vastness and rao- 
mentousness of their own. All that it con- 
cerns me to aver is, that the purpose which 
it will not answer is that of training the ear 
of a poet to rhythmical melodies. And how 
little it lends itself to any high order of 
poetical purposes, may be judged by the 
dreary results of every attempt which is 
made to apply it to purposes of a cognate 
character — to prayers, for example, and spi- 
ritual exercises. Compare our modern com- 
positions of this kind with the language of 
the liturgy — a language which, though for the 
most part short and ejaculatory and not de- 
manding to be rhythmic in order to be under- 
stood, partakes, nevertheless, in the highest 
degree, of the musical expressiveness which 
i 3 



178 THE LIFE POETIC. 

pervaded the compositions of the time. Listen 
to it in all its varieties of strain and cadence, 
sudden or sustained, — now holding on in 
assured strength, now sinking in a soft con- 
trition, and anon soaring in the joyfulness of 
faith, — confession, absolution, exultation, each 
to its appropriate music, and these again 
contrasted with the steady statements of the 
doxologies ; — Let us listen, I say, to this 
language, which is one effusion of celestial 
harmonies, and compare with it the flat and 
uninspired tones and flagging movements of 
those compounds of petition and exhortation 
(from their length and multifariousness pe- 
culiarly demanding rhythmic support) which 
are to be found in modern collections of 
prayers for the use of families. I think the 
comparison will constrain us to acknowledge 
that short sentences in long succession, how- 
ever clear in construction and correct in 
grammar, if they have no rhythmic impulse — 
though they may very well deliver them- 
selves of what the writer thinks and means 
— will fail to bear in upon the mind any 



THE LIFE POETIC. 179 

adequate impression of what he feels — his 
hopes and fears, his joy, his gratitude, his 
compunction, his anguish and tribulation ; 
or, indeed, any assurance that he had not 
merely framed a document of piety, in which 
he had carefully set down whatever was 
most proper to he said on the mornings and 
evenings of each day. These compositions 
have been, by an illustrious soldier, desig- 
nated " fancy prayers," and this epithet may 
be suitable to them in so far as they make 
no account of authority and prescription ; 
but neither to the fancy nor to the imagina- 
tion do they appeal through any utterance 
which can charm the ear. 

I come back, then, to the position that a 
poet should make companions chiefly of those 
writers who have written in the confidence 
that their books would be learned and in- 
wardly digested, and whose language was 
framed for patient and erudite ears and an 
attitude of the mind like that in which St. 
Paul listened to Gamaliel, sitting at Ms feet, 
And I think that he should rather avoid anv 



180 THE LIFE POETIC. 

habitual resort to books, however delightful in 
their kind, such as are written in these times 
and for these times, to catch the fugacious or 
stimulate the sluggish reader ; books such as 
may be read in the captiousness of haste by a 
lawyer with an appointment to keep and a 
watch on the table, or in an inapprehensive 
weariness by a country gentleman after a day 
of field sports. 

Moreover, by this abstinence, and by a 
conversancy with elder models in the matter 
of diction, the poet will be enabled to employ 
as his own, by the habit which is a second 
nature, that slightly archaistic colouring of 
language, which, being removed from what is 
colloquial and familiar, at the same time that 
it has no incongruity or unnatural strange- 
ness, is, I think, in these times at least (as 
by Spenser and others it was deemed to be 
formerly also), the best costume in which 
poetry can be clothed, combining what is 
common to other ages with what is charac- 
teristic of its own. At the same time the 
true poet will be choice and chary, as well as 



THE LIFE POETIC. 181 

moderate, in the use of archaisms ; by no 
means detaining or reviving old forms of 
speech, which, being intrinsically bad, are in 
a way to be worthily forgotten. The wells 
of English were not altogether undefiled in 
any age ; and they who aspire to be what 
poets ought to be, the conservators of lan- 
guage, will proceed, not by obstructing the 
expurgation of their mother tongue, — a pro- 
cess which, as well as its corruption, is con- 
tinually on foot, — but by remanding to their 
more derivative significations, words which 
are beginning to go astray, and by observing 
with a keener insight the latent metaphorical 
fitness or unfitness by which all language is 
pervaded. 

Nor is it to be supposed that the true poet 
will betray his trust in the conservation of 
his country's tongue, through any latitude 
popularly permitted to him for convenience 
of rhyme or rhythm. For whatever may be 
meant by those who speak of poetical license, 
that phrase would mislead us much, were we 
to suppose that the language of poetry is not 



182 THE LIFE POETIC. 

required to be precise for the most part, and 
beyond all other language apt and discrimina- 
tive. And though this peculiar aptitude will 
escape many of the poet's readers (if he have 
many), and much of it will not be recognised 
at once even by the more skilful few, yet in 
this, as in other matters of art, it is what can 
be fully appreciated only by continual study, 
that will lay the strongest foundations of 
fame. The " hsec placuit semel " should be, 
to the poet, of infinitely less account than the 
" hsec decies repetita placebit :" nor is he 
worthy of the name of a poet who would not 
rather be read a hundred times by one reader 
than once by a hundred. 

When that great man of whom I have 
already made mention, speaks of his life as 
led in his library and with his books, those to 
which he adverts as his never-failing friends, 
are the books of other times; and a poet's 
feelings as to this companionship could not be 
more expressively conveyed than in the verses 
in which he has given them utterance : — 



THE LIFE POETIC. 183 

" My days among the dead are past, 
Around me I behold 
Where'er these casual eyes are cast, 

The mighty minds of old : 
My never-failing friends are they, 
With whom I converse day by day. 

" With them I take delight in weal, 

And seek relief in woe ; 
And while I understand and feel 

How much to them I owe, 
My cheeks have often been bedewed 
With tears of thoughtful gratitude. 

" My thoughts are with the dead : with them 

I live in long past years ; 
Their virtues love, their faults condemn, 

Partake their hopes and fears : 
And from their lessons, seek and find 
Instruction with an humble mind. 

" My hopes are with the dead. Anon 

My place with them will be ; 
And I with them shall travel on 

Through all eternity ; 
Yet leaving here a name, I trust, 
That will not perish in the dust." 

With regard to the habitual reading of books 
in foreign languages, whether living lan- 
guages or other, I, being but very imperfectly 



184 THE LIFE POETIC. 

acquainted with any but my own, am not 
competent to say what would be the effect of 
it upon a poet's diction and numbers ; but 
this subject is one which would deserve to be 
investigated by some duly qualified critic * 
Milton, I think, though he greatly enriched 
his store of poetical images and materials by 
his conversancy with Latin, Greek, and Italian 
books, did yet suffer injury on the other hand 
in the perverting of his diction to the Latin ; 
his numbers, however, (for numbers are less 
than diction accessible to foreign influence), 
remaining unwarped and eminently his 
country's and his own. Dante had no indi- 



* Since the first and second editions of this book were pub- 
lished, I have been informed by Mr. Crabbe Robinson, the friend 
of Schiller and of most of the other great men of letters of his 
times in England and Germany, — indeed I may add, the friend 
of all men, great and small, who stand in need of his friendship, 
— that being one day with Schiller in his library, and observing 
on the shelves a collection of German translations of Shakspeare, 
he inquired how it was that Schiller, who understood English, 
could require these translations, Schiller's answer was, that he 
was in the habit of reading as little as possible in foreign lan- 
guages, because it was his business to write German, and he 
thought that by reading in other languages he should lose his 
nicer perceptions of what belonged to his own. 



THE LIFE POETIC. 185 

genous literature to assist him in the mould- 
ing of his verse, being himself the founder of 
the Italian as a literate language; and he 
rebukes with some severity of disdain, those 
who were " tarn obscense rationis," as to mag- 
nify the language of their native country 
above every other. " For myself/' he says, 
" whose country is the world, being native to 
that as the fish to the sea, though I drank the 
waters of the Arno before I had a tooth in my 
head, and have so loved Florence as, by reason 
of my love, to undergo an unjust banishment, 
yet have I holden my judgment subject to my 
reason rather than to my senses ; and as to 
Florence whence I am sprung, regard it 
though I may as the place in the world most 
pleasant to me, yet when I revolve the works 
of the poets and other writers by wiiom the 
world has been described in all its particulars 
from pole to pole, I am strong and absolute 
in the opinion, derived from other evidence 
than that of the senses, that there are regions 
and cities more delightful and noble than 
those of Tuscany, and languages better both 



186 THE LIFE POETIC. 

for their use and their charm than the 
Latian."* 

It would be matter of much interest to know 
from competent critics, how far the operation 
of these sentiments is to be traced in the fabric 
of Dante's verse, he having had, as it were, to 
build it up from the ground ; or how far the 
native genius of the language has ruled 
supreme. If Milton, however, have accepted 
foreign aid, and perhaps Dante also, yet 

* " Nam quicunque tarn obscense rationis est ut locum suae 
nationis deliciosissimum credat esse sub sole, huic etiam prae 
cunctis proprium vulgare licebit, id est maternam locutionem, 
prseponere : . . . . Nos autem, cui mundus est patria velut 
piscibus sequor, quamquam Sarnum biberimus ante dentes, et 
Florentiam adeo diligamus ut, quia dileximus, exilium patiamur 
injuste, ratione magis quam sensu spatulas nostri judicii podia- 
mus : et quamvis ad voluptatem nostram, sive nostrse sensuali- 
tatis quietem, in terris amoenior locus quam Florentia non existat, 
revolventes et poetarum, et aliorum scriptorum volumina, quibus 
mundus universaliter et membratim describitur, ratiocinantesque 
in nobis situationes varias mundi locorum et eorum habitudinem 
ad utrumque polum et circulum sequatoreum, multas esse perpen- 
dimus firmiterque censemus, et magis nobiles et magis deliciosas 
et regiones et urbes, quam Thusciam et Florentiam, unde sum 
oriundus et civis, et plerasque nationes et gentes delectabiliori 
atque utiliori sermone uti, quam Latinos." — De Vulgari Eloquio, 
1 — 6. I extract the passage, because in translating I have 
abridged it. 



THE LIFE POETIC. 187 

Shakspeare is a signal example of the all- 
sufficiency of national resources; having, with 
his "small Latin and less Greek," so large 
and various a vocabulary, it hardly seems 
possible that any extent of erudition could 
have bettered it, and a structure of language 
so flexible and multiform, that it could not 
have been more so had there been a con- 
fluence of twenty tributary tongues at its 
formation. 

Having considered, if not sufficiently, yet at 
sufficient length, after what manner a poet is 
to live, it may be well, before I conclude, to 
inquire at what period of his life he should 
deem himself to be prepared for the exercise 
of his vocation on a large scale. And from 
the nature of some of the preparations which 
have been treated of as indispensable, it will 
plainly appear that this period will not arrive 
in early youth. For if contemplation, action, 
conversancj^with life and affairs, varied duties, 
much solitude in its turn, with observation of 
Nature, and reading select and severe if not 
extensive, be, as I have deemed them to be. 



188 THE LIFE POETIC. 

essential requisites for the writing of poetry 
in its higher and graver kinds, some not 
inconsiderable tract of matured life must 
have been travelled through before these fruits 
can have been gathered. And with this hypo- 
thesis our literary history and biography will 
be found to accord. Milton, at twenty-three 
years of age, thought that he ripened slowly ; 
and when he supposed himself less happy in 
that respect than others, doubtless it was 
because his own deficiencies were better 
known to him than theirs : — 

" How soon hath Time, the subtle thief of youth, 
Stolen, on his wing, my three-and-twentieth year, 
My hasting days fly on with full career, 

But my late spring no bud or blossom sheweth. 

Perhaps my semblance might deceive the truth 
That I towards manhood am arrived so near, 
And inward ripeness doth much less appear, 

Than some more timely happy spirits indueth," 

Even in his twenty-ninth year he regarded 
his poetical efforts (and comparing himself 
with himself, perhaps we may say with rea- 
son,) as a plucking of the " berries harsh and 
crude." But the history of poetry at large 



THE LIFE POETIC. 189 

would show, I think, that Milton's poetical 
faculties were not of slower growth than 
those of other poets of the high and intellec- 
tual orders ; and that at all events the period 
of the culmination of such poets is in middle 
life. And with regard to exceptional cases 
— instances of high achievement at other 
periods, — whilst a few may be cited as be- 
longing to the periods short of middle life, 
more illustrious examples still will be found 
belonging to periods beyond it. Pope wrote 
verses with singular grace and dexterity in 
his early youth: but, on the other hand, 
Dryden when he produced the " Alexander's 
Feast," was in his sixty-seventh year; and "are 
not the gleanings of the grapes of Ephraim 
better than the vintage of Abiezer ? " Goethe 
may be quoted as an authority as well as an 
example. When the poet, in the Prologue 
to the Faust, sighs after his lost youth, his 
friend reproves him, and whilst admitting 
that youth is propitious to divers other ends 
and exercises, declares that, for the purposes 
of poetry, the elder is the better man : — 



190 THE LIFE POETIC. 



" The cunning hand of art to fling 
With spirit o'er the accustom'd string ; 
To seem to wander, yet to bend 
Each motion to the harmonious end : 
Such is the task our ripened age imposes, 
Which makes our day more glorious ere it closes." * 

Nor is it only the poetry of the highest 
intellectual order which is better written 
after youth than in youth. Even for amorous 
poetry, there is a richer vein than that of 
youth's temperament, and a more attractive 
art than youth can attain to. Let the mas- 
ters of erotic verse be mustered, and it will 
appear I think, that few or none of them 
wrote consummately in early youth, whilst 
the best of them gave utterance to their best 
strains long after they had sung their " Vixi 
Puellis." The sense of proportion, which is 
required equally in the lighter as in the 
graver kinds of poetry, is naturally imperfect 
in youth, through undue ardour in particu- 
lars; and no very young poet will be content 
to sacrifice special felicities to general effect. 

* Lord F. Egerton's translation. 



THE LIFE POETIC. 191 

Nor can there well exist, at an early period 
of life, that rare and peculiar balance of all 
the faculties, which, even more perhaps 
than a peculiar force in any, constitutes a 
great poet: — the balance of reason with 
imagination, passion with self-possession, 
abundance with reserve, and inventive con- 
ception with executive ability. 

On the whole, therefore, it is not desirable 
that a poet should prosecute any great en- 
terprise in early youth ; nor is it likely that 
his lighter efforts will be worth much. 
Nevertheless, it is the period for practice and 
exercise ; and a poet must and will write 
much verse in youth, and he will be much 
the better for it ; nor will he write it with the 
purpose of throwing it away. If he be 
affected with the usual impatience of an 
ardent temperament in early life, it will 
perhaps be best for him to publish ; for till he 
have rid himself of this impatience, he will not 
go to work with an ambition sufficiently long- 
sighted and a steady preference of ulterior 
to early results. And publication, if unsuc- 



192 THE LIFE POETIC. 

cessful, (as the juvenile publications of great 
poets are almost sure to be), is a sedative of 
much virtue and efficacy in such cases. " Be 
not ambitious of an early fame," says Mr. 
Landor, " for such is apt to shrivel and drop 
under the tree." Early success puts an end 
to severe study and strenuous endeavour; 
whereas early failure in those in whom there 
is genuine poetic genius, and what commonly 
accompanies it — 

" Faith in the whispers of the lonely Muse — " * 

acts as a sort of narcotic stimulant, allaying 
impatience, but quickening the deeper mind. 

The outset of a poet's life, and the conduct 
of it " net mezzo del cammin " — the seasons in 
which his poetry is sown and reaped — are 
most important to the interests of the art 
and of mankind. The manner in which it 
shall be drawn to a close may be supposed 
to be important chiefly to the poet himself: 
yet it is not altogether so ; and a few words 

* Wordsworth. 



THE LIFE POETIC. 193 

may not be wasted in speaking of that latter 
autumn of a poet's life which succeeds his 
harvest-home. With poets whose life reaches 
its three-score-years-and-ten, this will be a 
period of some years' duration. For the fact 
that by some great poets some short poetical 
efforts have been hazarded in old age with 
eminent success, should not certainly lead 
to the conclusion that an old man should 
occupy himself in adding to the bulk of his 
poetical works, (especially if already volumi- 
nous), when he can no longer hope to en- 
hance their rateable and specific value. It 
is important to every poet to keep his works 
within compass. Moreover, the intensities 
of life should be allowed to come to their 
natural close some steps short of the grave ; 
and passionate writing should not be ex- 
tended over this period, even if the imagina- 
tion have not ceased to be impassioned. 

There are other ways, at once congenial 
with the poetic life and consentaneous with 
its decline, in which the activities that remain 
may be gently exercised, when the passion 



194 THE LIFE POETIC. 

has been laid to rest. The long education of 
a poet's life (for as long as he lives he should 
learn) will have enabled him to detect, at the 
end of it, many faults in his writings which 
he knew not of before ; and there will be 
many faults, also, of which he was cognisant, 
but which, in the eagerness of his productive 
years, he had not found leisure or inclination 
to amend. In his old age, as long as the 
judgment and the executive power over 
details shall be unimpaired,— as long as the 
hand shall not have lost its cunning,— the 
work of correction may be carried on to 
completeness, and the poet's house be put 
in order. Some caution will be requisite. 
Age is prone to fastidiousness; and if the 
poet can no longer go along with the ardours 
of his younger years, he should take care 
lest he quench them with too cold a touch. 
Age, too, is vacillating : and if he have lost 
his clearness and decisiveness of choice, he 
should not deal with any delinquencies of 
his younger verse except those which are 
flagrant; and in all his corrections, indeed, 



THE LIFE POETIC. 195 

the presumption should be in favour of the 
first draft, which should have the benefit of 
the doubt if there be one; otherwise the 
works may be the worse for the last hand. 
But, subject to these conditions, there seems 
to be no employment better suited to the old 
age of a poet, than that of purifying and 
making less perishable that which he trusts 
may be the earthly representative of his im- 
mortal part. 

For such purpose and in so far forth, he 
may permit himself, even at a period when 
"the last infirmity" should be on its last 
legs, to be occupied with himself and his 
fame. But when his own works are as he 
would wish to leave them, nothing of that 
which is peculiar to him as a poet and not 
common to him as a man, will so well become 
his latter days, as to look beyond himself 
and have regard to the future fortunes of 
his art involved in the rising generation 
of poets. It should be his desire and his 
joy to cherish the lights by which his own 
shall be succeeded, and, perhaps, out-shone. 



196 THE LIFE POETIC. 

The personal influence of an old poet upon 
a young one — youth and age being har- 
monised by the sympathies of the art — may 
do what no writings can, to mould those 
spirits by which, hereafter, many are to be 
moulded ; and as the reflex of a glorious 
sunset will sometimes tinge the eastern sky, 
the declining poet may communicate to those 
who are to come after him, not guidance 
only, but the very colours of his genius, 
the temper of his moral mind, and the in- 
spiration of his hopes and promises. That 
done, or ceasing to be practicable through 
efflux of light, it will only remain for the 
poet to wait in patience and peace, 

" While night 
Invests the sea, and wished morn delays." * 

* Paradise Lost. 



THE END. 



LONDON : 
BRADBURY AND EVANS, PRINTERS, WHITEFRIABS. 



